Language and Ontological Knowledge: The Contrast between Objects and Events Made by Spanish and English Speakers

Sera, Maria D.; Gathje, Jaime; Pintado, Javier del Castillo

doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2645

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar ; event + ser ) and incorrect (object + ser ; event + estar ) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser ’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar ’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree.…”

supporting

confidence: 90%

“…They also were significantly more accurate rejecting the ungrammatical ‘object+ ser ’ than the ungrammatical ‘event+ estar ’ constructions, confirming the strong ungrammaticality of the ‘object+ ser ’ condition compared to the less strong violation in the ‘event+ estar’ condition (Sera et al, 1999). The result is also in line with previous experimental findings testing locative constructions in monolingual Spanish speakers (Sera et al, 1999; Leone-Fernández et al, 2012), and suggests that native Spanish speakers are more likely to accept an event noun followed by the copula estar in locative constructions than an object noun followed by ser . In contrast to the native speakers, the behavioral results of the advanced and beginning learners seem to suggest that they have not acquired the use of the copula ser with event subjects; they accepted the correct locative constructions (‘event+ ser ’) at chance level and also accepted the incorrect ‘event+ estar ’ construction more than the native speakers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

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Processingserandestarto locate objects and events

Dussias

Contemori²,

Román³

2014

RESLA

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In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as ‘to be’). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of ‘object/event + estar/ser’ permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ‘en’ showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less accurate than native speakers in all conditions, while the advanced speakers only differed from the natives in the event+ser and event+estar conditions. For the ERPs, the beginning learners did not show any effects in the time-windows under analysis. The advanced speakers showed a pattern similar to that of native speakers: (1) a P600 response to ‘object + ser’ violation more central and frontally distributed, and (2) a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms for ‘event + estar’ violation. Findings for the advanced speakers suggest that behavioral methods commonly used to assess grammatical knowledge in the L2 may be underestimating what L2 speakers have actually learned.

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supporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Processingserandestarto locate objects and events

Dussias

Contemori²,

Román³

2014

RESLA

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“…Other cross‐linguistic studies have shown evidence for colour categorization and colour language terms (Berlin & Kay, 1969), later found robust with a possible physiological explanation (Davidoff et al ., 1999) (Dani, Berinmo, English), for cultural categories of shame (Frank et al ., 2000) (Chinese, English), for counterfactual reasoning (Bloom, 1981) (Chinese, English), for spatial reasoning (Bowerman, 1996; Pederson et al ., 1998; Levinson et al ., 2002; Bowerman & Choi, 2003) (Mopan, Tzeltal, Yucatec, Totonac, Kilivila, Longgu, kgalagadi, Hailom, Arandic, Tamil, Belhare, Dutch and Japanese, Korean, English, Dutch), for gender systems (Boroditsky et al ., 2003) (Spanish, English, German) and for objects and events based on spatial characteristics (Sera et al ., 1999) (Spanish, English).…”

Section: Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a cognitive foundation for knowledge representation

Evermann

2005

Information Systems Journal

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Knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling are concerned with representing knowledge of business and organizational domains. These research areas use ontologies for knowledge representation. Ontologies are understood either in the philosophical sense as firm metaphysical commitments or in the looser sense of dictionaries or taxonomies.This paper critically examines the understanding and use of ontologies and knowledge representation languages in information systems (IS) research and application. As ontologies are intended to be conceptualizations of a perceived reality, they should reflect the empirically observed reality. This motivates proposing psychology of language as a reference discipline for knowledge engineering and knowledge management. Natural language is argued to reflect the cognitive concepts we use to think about and perceive the world around us. These cognitive concepts are the relevant terms with which to structure and represent knowledge about the world.Psychology of language can provide empirical justification for a particular set of concepts to represent knowledge. This paper draws on psycho-linguistic research to develop a proposal for a system of cognitive structures. This is argued to provide the relevant concepts on which to found knowledge representation schemata for knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling.

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“…Thus, in Experiment 3 we tried to extend the design of Experiments 1 and 2 using realistic materials. A complication of such a design is that there may be cultural differences in people's ontological knowledge that could correspondingly affect the categorization process (Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999; but see Lopez, Atran, Coley, Medin, & Smith, 1997). For Experiment 3, our only assumption is that the influence of general knowledge on how participants represented the stimuli would be analogous, because all our participants (in that experiment) came from a relatively homogenous population: they were all undergraduate students at the same university.…”

Section: Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization

Pothos

Chater

Stewart

2004

British J of Psychology

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This paper considers whether information about the logical structure of a category affects how people generalize. We carried out three experiments with the following structure: participants were first presented with a set of training items, and were subsequently asked to decide whether new items belonged to the same category as the training items. Each experiment had two conditions that differed only in terms of the category label provided for the training items; different category labels conveyed different information about the logical structure of the category to which the training items were supposed to belong. In all cases, participants' generalization was greatly affected by such information. Our results suggest that people make the default assumption that category labels correspond to groupings of highly similar objects.

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Language and Ontological Knowledge: The Contrast between Objects and Events Made by Spanish and English Speakers

Cited by 16 publications

References 39 publications

Processingserandestarto locate objects and events

Processingserandestarto locate objects and events

Towards a cognitive foundation for knowledge representation

Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization

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