Composed of:

Elements or states (words or word categories)

Transitions between the states

Problem with FSGs

Accounts for iteration: We can add conjunctions on to end

but not for recursion

Problem of meaning.

What is the meaning of "Farm"?

• John has a farm
• John likes to farm
• John bought the farm

Meaning is a relationship between symbols and a model of objects in the world.

A logical relationship between an assertion and its truth value in a possible world.

Proposition: A formal relationship between concepts that has some truth value (true/false)

bought(John, farm)

Problem with Truth Conditional Semantics:

• It's formal and logical, but doesn't address how we really think about information
• Doesn't fully address issues of how we represent knowledge in our mind
• Doesn't address whether there are innate aspects of meaning

Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff, 1992)

Meaning is a relationship between language symbols and mental concepts

The meaning of a concept is composed of features(lexical decomposition)

Dog: has fur, barks, four legs, mammal …..

We generate a mental representation of a sentence in a conceptual structure

Goal is to map between syntactic structure and this conceptual structure

There are some (innate) semantic primitives that permit us to compare concepts

inanimate vs. animate

We use rules of inference to connect conceptual structures and concepts so that we can "understand" sentences, ideas, utterances

The level at which we analyze stimuli affects how well the information is remembered.

Semantic encoding results in deepest encoding

Elaboration: The process of forming connections between one set of concepts and another.

Elaborative processing permits more cues to retrieve information

Stein & Bransford's study of sentence memory

But… elaborative processing depends on encoding for the appropriate situation

Encoding Specificity Principle: (Tulving)

The memorability of an item will depend on the similarity of the contexts used when encoding and when retrieved

Morris, Bransford and Franks (1971)

Study words either for phonological or semantic properties

Recognition of whether word rhymed with words that had been studied better for people who studied phonological properties.

Semantic encoding is not always the best for performance

Cognitive processes occur in parallel

Processing is distributed: Information is represented as a pattern of activity across units

Accounts for top-down effects

Central processing activities cannot be localized in terms of specific brain regions

Modules are domain specific

Each system works with its own information in its own representation

Modules are informationally encapsulated

Modules display localization of function