On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Hyejin YounTanmoy Bhattacharya

Abstract

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single "polysemous" word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows th...Continue Reading

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Citations

Aug 9, 2016·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Gary Lupyan, Rick Dale
Apr 10, 2019·Cognitive Neuropsychology·Barbara C Malt
Dec 21, 2019·Science·Joshua Conrad JacksonKristen A Lindquist
Oct 20, 2018·Nature Human Behaviour·Ann E SizemoreDanielle S Bassett
Jul 6, 2020·Cognitive Science·Abdellah FourtassiMichael C Frank
Aug 12, 2020·Nature Human Behaviour·Bill ThompsonGary Lupyan
Jan 14, 2021·Nature Communications·Douglas GuilbeaultDamon Centola
Jun 7, 2020·Cognition·Douglas GuilbeaultBhargav Srinivasa Desikan
May 23, 2020·Cognition·Yang XuMahesh Srinivasan
May 22, 2021·Cognitive Science·Barend BeekhuizenSuzanne Stevenson
Oct 5, 2021·Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science·Joshua Conrad JacksonKristen A Lindquist

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