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Reconciling Embodied and Distributional Accounts of Meaning in Language
Author(s) -
Andrews Mark,
Frank Stefan,
Vigliocco Gabriella
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/tops.12096
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , meaning (existential) , cognition , cognitive science , perception , philosophy of science , interdependence , psychology , cognitive neuroscience , cognitive psychology , epistemology , sociology , social science , philosophy , neuroscience
Over the past 15 years, there have been two increasingly popular approaches to the study of meaning in cognitive science. One, based on theories of embodied cognition, treats meaning as a simulation of perceptual and motor states. An alternative approach treats meaning as a consequence of the statistical distribution of words across spoken and written language. On the surface, these appear to be opposing scientific paradigms. In this review, we aim to show how recent cross‐disciplinary developments have done much to reconcile these two approaches. The foundation to these developments has been the recognition that intralinguistic distributional and sensory‐motor data are interdependent. We describe recent work in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modeling that are all based on or consistent with this conclusion. We conclude by considering some possible directions for future research that arise as a consequence of these developments.