Knowing the Meaning of a Word by the Linguistic and Perceptual Company It Keeps

• Published in: Topics in cognitive science Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 573 - 589
• Main Author: Louwerse, Max M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.07.2018
• Subjects: Arbitrariness; Cognition & reasoning; Embodied cognition; Language; Language statistics; Perceptual simulation; Symbolic cognition; Language statistics; Embodied cognition; Arbitrariness; Perceptual simulation; Symbolic cognition
• ISSN: 1756-8757; 1756-8765
• DOI: 10.1111/tops.12349

Debates on meaning and cognition suggest that an embodied cognition account is exclusive of a symbolic cognition account. Decades of research in the cognitive sciences have, however, shown that these accounts are not at all mutually exclusive. Acknowledging cognition is both symbolic and embodied generates more relevant questions that propel, rather than divide, the cognitive sciences: questions such as how computational symbolic findings map onto experimental embodied findings, and under what conditions cognition is relatively more symbolic or embodied in nature. The current paper revisits the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis, which argues that language encodes perceptual information and that language users rely on these language statistics in cognitive processes. It argues that the claim that words are , amodal, and arbitrary symbols and therefore must always be grounded to become meaningful is an oversimplification of the language system. Instead, language has evolved such that it maps onto the perceptual system, whereby language users rely on language statistics, which allow for bootstrapping meaning also when grounding is limited. In an evolutionary perspective Louwerse elaborates the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis (Louwerse, 2011), arguing that language has evolved such that it maps onto the perceptual system, allowing to bootstrap meaning also when grounding is limited. The author concludes that in principle the processing of and concrete words is the same and that in both cases language users tend to rely anyway on indexical relationships that words entertain with other words.