Curt Burgess

University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Psychology

concepts such as weather terms, proper names and emotional terms all segregate into their own meaning spaces. One advantage of representing meaning with vectors such as these is that, since each vector element is a symbol in the input stream (typically another word); all words have as their "features" other words. This translates into the ability t...

A specification of the structural characteristics of the mental lexicon is a central goal in word recognition research. Of various word-level characteristics, semantics remains the most resistant to this endeavor. Although there are several theoretically distinct models of lexical semantics with fairly clear operational definitions (e.g., in terms...

Targets related to ambiguous primes were projected to the left and right visual fields in a lexical priming experiment with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) of 35 and 750 msec. Right visual field results were similar to our earlier results with central projection (G. B. Simpson & C. Burgess, 1985, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percepti...

This paper presents a theoretical approach of how simple, episodic associations are transduced into semantic and grammatical categorical knowledge. The approach is implemented in the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) model of memory, which uses a simple global co-occurrence learning algorithm to encode the context in which words occur. This enc...

Previous research has described the significant role that social interaction plays in both the acquisition and use of speech by parrots. The current study analyzed the speech of one home-raised African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) across three different social contexts: owner interacting with parrot in the same room, owner and parrot...

This chapter explores the benefits of restructuring search spaces and internal representations so as to make search more efficient. It begins by providing a formal definition of search, and proposes a method for shifting search between low-and high-dimensionality problem spaces. Consideration is given to how learning shapes the representations that...

Political actors typically use language with the goal of persuading an audience. But what shapes the use of language in political settings? Is it differences between ideologues — liberals and conservatives — that change language use? Or is it support or opposition to the issue? Using techniques adapted from cognitive psychology we examine arguments...

This chapter provides an information theory approach, deriving entropic measures to compare adult and infant bottlenose dolphin whistle communications, and considers an “auto-correlation” application of information theory. It analyzes the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL) model and offers the conceptual framework behind each method, as well as pr...

Experts investigate communicative flexibility (in both form and usage of signals) as the foundation of the evolution of complex communication systems, including human language. The evolutionary roots of human communication are difficult to trace, but recent comparative research suggests that the first key step in that evolutionary history may have...

The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., city-grass). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for monolingual...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of chronic non-clinical depression (ChD) on the use of ambiguous and unambiguous emotional words in language contexts. Participants with ChD and normal non-depressed (ND) participants' responses to positive and negative stimulus words on a free association word test were compared using the Hy...

The present experiment investigates hemispheric differences in mediated priming. Theories of lexical representation have argued for an asymmetrical coding between the right and left hemispheres ([Beeman, 1998]), claiming that the right hemisphere is more diffusely represented compared to the left hemisphere. Thus, the right hemisphere activates a l...

Introduction The use of semantic information in .language comprehension is a matter' of controversy. We briefly review Frazier's modular serial paxset nd Altmann and Steedman's conceptually driven parser. We propose a tMrd model, based on the work of Tanenhaus and Carlson [1988],[Tanenhaus et al. 1987], that a.counts for the conflicting results of...

Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) demon- strated that orthographic information is obligatorily activated during auditory word recognition by showing that rhyme decisions to orthographically similar rhymes pie-tie were quicker than rhyme decisions to orthographically dissimilar rhymes e- tie. This effect could be due to the fact that orthographic and...

This paper received the Castellan Award for best student submission at the 1999 conference of the Society for Computers in Psychology. The research was supported by an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award SBR-9453406 tu C.B. We thank Guila Glosser and Susan Kemper for providing us with the interview transcripts and subject data reported in this pa...

this article should be addressed to C. Burgess, Psychology Department, 1419 Life Science Bldg., University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0426 (e-mail: curt@citrns.ucr. edu)

naesthesia of the PIP joint itself had no observable effect on the ability to sense movement of the joint. INTRODUCTION Humans have an awareness of the positions and movements of their limbs, and these proprioceptive senses derive from sensory receptors in the limbs (Goodwin, 1976; McCloskey, 1978). The prevailing view holds that position and movem...

The Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model of memory learns what words mean using a simple learning algorithm on 320 million words of Usenet text. The meanings of words are represented in a 140,000 dimensional hyperspace. A variety of metrics are developed in the model have broad explanatory power that captures a range of cognitive phenomena i...

Syntactic and semantic processing of literal and idiomatic phrases were investigated with a priming procedure. In 3 experiments, participants named targets that were syntactically appropriate or inappropriate completions for semantically unrelated sentence contexts. Sentences ended with incomplete idioms (kick the...) and were biased for either a l...

Previous research has demonstrated that the language of older adults leads to denser representations in a high dimensional model of memory than does the language of younger adults (Conley & Burgess, in press), and thus that density in the model (HAL or the hyperspace analogue to language) may constitute a useful metric in comparing memory for young...

Applying to graduate school in psychology can be an intimidating process. Many obstacles must be overcome, such as applying to a program appropriate to the specific applicant, getting good GRE scores, submitting a clear and well-written statement of purpose, and obtaining letters of recommendation, to name just a few. Much information is available...

Applying to graduate school in psychology can be an intimidating process. Many obstacles must be overcome, such as applying to a program appropriate to the specific applicant, getting good GRE scores, submitting a clear and well-written statement of purpose, and obtaining letters of recommendation, to name just a few. Much information is available...

This paper details the use of computational models, specifically, a high-dimensional memory model (HAL, or the Hyperspace Analogue to Language), to investigate aspects of spreading activation. Analysis demonstrated a robust relationship between the semantic density of the target word and human reaction time data. Furthermore, priming was detected o...

Glenberg and Robertson (2000) conducted three experiments to investigate the adequacy of high-dimensional memory models in accounting for the meaningful interpretation of sentences. They conclude that high-dimensional memory models (such as LSA and HAL) are inadequate as theories of meaning. As an alternative account, they offer an embodied approac...

Deep dyslexia is diagnosed when brain-injured, previously literate adults make reading errors that include hallmark semantic paralexias (e.g., reading HEART as BLOOD) and are also impaired at reading nonwords (e.g., FRIP). The diversity of these symptoms have led most researchers to conclude that there are multiple sources of impairment in this syn...

Previous research demonstrates that semantic priming is relatively unaffected by age (Chiarello, Church, & Hoyer, 1985; Howard, 1988). To determine how age might affect representations in the HAL model of memory, the authors gathered text from older and younger adults and generated a global co-occurrence matrix for each. An analysis demonstrated th...

The semantic character of the mental lexicon has proven difficult to characterize in an objective manner. In this paper we contrast two quantitative measures of semantic relatedness; one that defines semantics in terms of human word associations and another that defines it in terms of lexical co-occurrences in a high-dimensional semantic space. Wor...

Two divided visual field priming experiments were designed to determine the nature of lexical retrieval in the cerebral hemispheres by studying the facilitation of semantic features of unambiguous nouns. Unambiguous nouns have a single meaning, yet semantic features associated with these nouns may vary in the degree to which they are compatible wit...

The deferral of ambiguity resolution has been thought to be an important component of creativity. The time course of priming of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words was investigated using a divided visual field priming paradigm with subjects that varied on a measure of creativity. The Wallach-Kogan similarities subtest was used to g...

Two divided visual field priming experiments were designed to determine the nature of lexical retrieval in the cerebral hemispheres by studying the facilitation of semantic features of unambiguous nouns. Unambiguous nouns have a single meaning, yet semantic features associated with these nouns may vary in the degree to which they are compatible wit...

Few tools for research in proper names have been available--specifically, there is no large-scale corpus of proper names. Two corpora of proper names were constructed, one based on U.S. phone book listings, the other derived from a database of Usenet text. Name frequencies from both corpora were compared with human subjects' reaction times (RTs) to...

Cerebral asymmetries in semantic priming for interconceptually (e.g., boat-harbor) and intraconceptually (e.g., cat-dog) related words were investigated using a divided visual field paradigm. Results from the current study, in which subjects made explicit semantic judgements about primes and targets, indicated equivalent priming for both prime-targ...

Existing models of proper name semantics provide for separate stores for proper name information and common semantic information. Using the HAL model of memory, we show that a common meaning space can accommodate both proper names, famous proper names and common nouns. In HAL, retrieval difficulty for proper names is due to a denser semantic space...

Word frequency is one of the strongest determiners of reaction time (RT) in word recognition tasks; it is an important theoretical and methodological variable. The Kučera and Francis (1967) word frequency count (derived from the 1-million-word Brown corpus) is used by most investigators concerned with the issue of word frequency. Word frequency est...

Mediated priming (MP) presumably occurs via a mediating item (e.g., LION primes STRIPES via TIGER; D. Balota and R. Lorch, 1986). G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff (1992) argue that MP is caused by weak, but direct, prime-target relationships. Semantic relatedness and lexical co-occurrence underlie this effect. We replicate the MP effect (lexical decision...

The study of lexical ambiguity has played an important role in characterizing hemispheric lexical retrieval mechanisms (Burgess & Simpson, 1988). However, two factors that may affect lexical retrieval are potentially confounded when studying subordinate word meanings: a weaker association strength and incompatibility with the dominant meaning of th...

Deriving representations of meaning, whether at the word, the sentence, or the discourse level, is a problem with a long history in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. In this article, we describe a computational model of high‐dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL), and present simulation evidence that HAL's vect...

Presenting a model of concept acquisition and modeling cerebral asymmetries in the lexical/semantic system is the goal of this chapter. The model we have developed accounts for a wide range of semantic effects in the cognitive and neuropsychological literature. In this chapter we present 2 aspects of our model of cerebral asymmetries of semantic...

Deriving representations of meaning has been a long-standing problem in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. The lack of a m odel for representing semantic and grammatical knowledge has been a handicap in attempting to model the effects of semantic constraints in hum an syntactic processing. A computational model of high-dim ensional context...

Deep dyslexic (DD) readers produce semantic errors during word naming and are impaired at nonword naming. Previous models of DD have explained this co-occurrence of deficits by postulating damage to both lexical and nonlexical pathways in the reading system. Buchanan, Hildebrandt and MacKinnon (1994) offered an alternative explanation that resulted...

Alone, the words lick, sprinkle, or mine would not lead to significant priming for the target word salt. When summated however, the combined effect of these three primes leads to activation of the target concept. Beeman et al. (1993) suggest that the locus of this summation priming is the right hemisphere. However, problems with stimulus selection...

A procedure that processes a corpus of text and produces numeric vectors containing information about its meanings for each word is presented. This procedure is applied to a large corpus of natural language text taken from Usenet, and the resulting vectors are examined to determine what information is contained within them. These vectors provide th...

A complete neurolinguistic model of language comprehension must include the representational and processing components housed in both the left and right cerebral hemispheres. This article focuses on figurative language, most notably the comprehension of metaphors and idioms. We propose that a theory of figurative language relies on a dynamic interp...

Burgess and Simpson (1988) found that the patterns of activation for dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words differed in the two hemispheres as a function of timecourse. After an initial automatic spread of activation in both hemispheres, the left hemisphere actively selects the dominant meaning (in the absence of sentential context) a...

This experiment investigated the sensitivity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres to morphologically ambiguous verbs (i.e., chased) and to morphologically unambiguous verbs (i.e., stolen) in a divided visual-field paradigm with normal subjects. Lexical decisions made to the ambiguous verbs were faster than those to the unambiguous verbs only...

Research in psycholinguistics traditionally has been guided by the assumption that the comprehension of language involves the construction of increasingly abstract levels of representation over time. For example, in understanding an utterance, a listener initially may construct fairly shallow descriptions of the utterance's acoustic and phonetic fo...

This study investigated spreading activation for words presented to the left and right hemispheres using an automatic semantic priming paradigm. Three types of semantic relations were used: similar-only (Deer-Pony), associated-only (Bee-Honey), and similar + associated (Doctor-Nurse). Priming of lexical decisions was symmetrical over visual fields...

To eliminate potential "backward" priming effects, Glucksberg, Kreuz, and Rho (1986) introduced a variant of the cross-modal lexical priming task in which subjects made lexical decisions to nonword targets that were modeled on a word related to either the contextually biased or unbiased sense of an ambiguous word. Lexical decisions to nonwords were...

To eliminate potential “backward” priming effects, Glucksberg, Kreuz, and Rho (1986) introduced a variant of the cross-modal lexical priming task in which subjects made lexical decisions to nonword targets that were modeled on a word related to either the contextually biased or unbiased sense of an ambiguous word. Lexical decisions to nonwords were...

Three experiments examined lexical and sentence-level contributions to contextual facilitation effects in word recognition. Subjects named target words preceded by normal or scrambled sentence contexts that contained lexical associates of the target. In Experiment 1, normal sentences showed facilitation for related targets and inhibition for unrela...

The implications of the lexical ambiguity problem go far beyond words with multiple dictionary entries. The issues involved in lexical ambiguity research are applicable to a wide range of comprehension phenomena. The selection processes that typify ambiguous words are, to some extent, relevant to all lexical access because all words normally have m...

This chapter proposes a tentative model of lexical ambiguity resolution that integrates the different lexical access patterns of the two cerebral hemispheres, and discusses this model in the context of the current understanding of lexical access and contextual constraints. It describes the divided visual field method, suggesting a frequency-coded m...

This chapter briefly reviews the results of the cross-modal literature and evaluates the extent to which multiple access is an artifact of backward priming. In order to use lexical ambiguity as a window on the interface between context and lexical access, one needs experimental techniques that can be used to trace the availability of the informatio...

We present some ideas about how thematic roles (case roles) associated with verbs are used durin on-line langnae comprehension along with some supportin perilllental evidence. The basic idea, followin S Cottell (1985), is that all of the thematic roles associated with a verb are activated in parallel when the verb is encountered. In addition, we pr...

This report describes 3 types of apparatus that were used to produce precise movements of a joint over a wide range of speeds and angles. The designs feature an ability for ultra slow rotation of the joint (fractions of a degree per min) with a minimum of extraneous cues. Two designs use servo-controlled DC motors configured as velocity servos and...

Proprioceptive ability with the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) and metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joints of the index finger in human subjects was examined using a method that could assess staticposition sense independently of movement sense (Clark et al., 1985). The similarity in location and function of these joints would suggest similar proprioceptiv...

We studied proprioception with the ankle joint and the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint of the index finger of humans by use of a method that could distinguish a position sense from a movement sense. The test measured how subjects' ability to detect a fixed displacement of a joint varied with the rate of joint rotation. A position sense should not d...

Three experiments examined the role of meaning frequency in the processing of ambiguous words in isolation. Subjects made lexical decisions to target words that were associates of the more frequent or less frequent meaning of a homograph prime. The first two experiments charted the time course of activation of the two meanings, showing that the dom...

A controversial issue involving online searching is the presence of the patron during the search process. Searcher attitudes of patron presence were examined by use of a nationwide survey (N=198). It was found that 77% of the searchers preferred to have the patron present. Regression analysis indicated that two factors accounted for 72% of the vari...