The use of linguistic and world knowledge in language processing

Abstract

There has been considerable investigation of the roles that linguistic and world knowledge play during language comprehension. This investigation is important because its results have ramifications for both basic questions about how the mature intact language comprehension system functions and for applied questions regarding how comprehension systems that are impaired by aphasia might function. In the current paper, we review debates and research related to the representation and use of linguistic and world knowledge in language comprehension and then describe a recent computational model that takes both world and linguistic knowledge into account in predicting language comprehension difficulty. We then review empirical work that attempts to characterize the interactions and potential trade-offs between world and linguistic knowledge during language comprehension, and relate this work to the computational model previously described. We conclude with a brief overview of a few open questions regarding the representation of linguistic and world knowledge. | DEFINING LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE AND WORLD KNOWLEDGESimply defined, linguistic knowledge is knowledge of the patterns that characterize linguistic input. World knowledge is knowledge of the patterns that characterize our experiences in the world. At certain levels of analysis, these two kinds of knowledge are quite distinct. For

Color interpretation is guided by informativity expectations, not by world knowledge about colors

“…This intuition underlies the studies we present here. Given the ample experimental evidence that comprehenders use plausibility-driven priors during interpretation (Warren and Dickey, 2021), we ask whether they also show evidence of tracking and using production likelihoods. We first established whether our predictions could result from comprehenders simply keeping track of co-ocurrence statistics, regardless of whether color is used contrastively or redundantly.…”

Color interpretation is guided by informativity expectations, not by world knowledge about colors

“…We call this the World Knowledge Hypothesis, whereby comprehenders use their experience with the world directly to anticipate what speakers will talk about. Indeed, there is evidence that comprehenders do rely on real-world, plausibility-driven priors during general language interpretation (Warren & Dickey, 2021). Under the account sketched in (2), comprehenders estimate that speakers use language to talk transparently about the world: Situations that are frequent in the world give rise to frequent utterances about those situations in speech.…”

Increased reliance on world knowledge during language comprehension in healthy aging: evidence from verb-argument prediction

“…Verb-argument prediction has been a central topic of investigation in the psycholinguistics literature (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Boland, 2005;Borovsky et al, 2012;Kamide et al, 2003;Mack et al, 2013;Milburn et al, 2016), and has provided critical evidence about how individuals take advantage of different sources of knowledge during the comprehension process (e.g., Warren & Dickey, 2021). Much of the evidence regarding verb-argument prediction comes from the visual world paradigm (Tanenhaus et al, 1995).…”