7 Essay: Learning the meaning of words

How we learn language remains one of the definitive problems of Cognitive Science. Language learning involves two aspects - learning what words mean in a language, and learning the grammar, or the regularities of the language.

In your discussions this week, you will focus on learning the meaning of words. The reading material is chapter 1: First Words from Paul Bloom's "How children learn the meaning of words".

The problem is much more complex than is thought initially. In your discussion, you should focus on three aspects:

• Disambiguating the reference [D]: How do we know which aspect of the situation a word may be referring to? This is dramatically illustrated in Quine's Gavagai argument (p.3-4), and other problems regarding how we use a word in different though related ways (p.9).
• What is a word? [W] How many words do we have? How does it differ for the deaf or the blind? (p. 5-8, 15-16).
• What is meaning [M]: Is it the set of objects being referred to? Are there necessary and sufficient conditions? (p. 17-22)

The students marked D, M, W in the list below are responsible for presenting the relevant material in the discussion, and your essay should be related to this aspect. However, everyone must read the chapter. You can go easy on p.2, and p.10-14, which relate to various debates in the field, and are peripheral to the main lines.

Despite repeated warnings, many of you have been continue to do large scale cut-and-paste in your essays. This is a very serious matter. For this submission, please write only a paragraph or two, and try to show some depth. For the essay, you are expected to do some additional reading from MITECS or other sources. Try to write with some depth that relates to your reading - just handwaving speculations are not very illuminating.

Keep your focus on a narrow topic. The essays which are due this Friday, should be VERY BRIEF, and MUST BE IN YOUR OWN WORDS. It should reference other materials that you have read (do not reference articles you have NOT read).

Some example topics may be "how children solve the gavagai problem", "learning idioms", "extension and intension", "spatial concept learning in blind children", etc.

GROUP A
abhim       Y6020        Abhishek  Malik           D 
sourav      Y7442        Sourav Khandelwal         W 
bvvsrd      Y7110        Bvv Sri Raj Dutt          M
draj        Y7134        Deepesh  Raj              W
guptaabh    Y6018        Abhishek  Gupta  A1       D   
kartikv     Y6216        Kartik Venkat             M
rahulcse    Y8111031     Rahul Gupta 		   M 

GROUP B
karuturi    Y7481        Pradeep  Karuturi         D
-pranavp    Y6327        Pranav  Pandit  A1        W  
sujith      Y9111063     sujith thomas             M
mishraa     Y6062        Anand  Mishra   A2        W  
nitishs     Y7268        Nitish  Srivastava        D
parimi      Y7270        Chaitanya Krishna Parimi  M
manisks     Y7227	 Manish Kumar Singh 	   M

GROUP C
rahulyk     Y7518        Yandrapally  Rahulkrishn  D
rvaish      Y6402        Rohit  Vaish              W
samarj      Y7378        Samarjeet                 M
sandipg     Y6425        Sandip Kumar Gupta        M
sanjayc     Y7388        Sanjay Chaudhary          D
seri        Y7395        Sarvesh Kumar Singh       W
						  
GROUP D
srikarun    Y6480        Srikarun  Dhurjati        D
singhn      Y7263        Nishant  		   D
skshitij    Y6225        Kshitij Singh             M
anuraga     Y7078        Anurag Awasthi            W
pushagg     Y6348        Pushkar  Aggarwal         D
srakesh     Y7457        Surapaneni Rakesh         W
ravic	    Y6385	 Ravisekhar  Chakraborty   M

Due date

Friday September 4

Submissions

1. Abhishek Gupta :

   LATE

2. Abhishek Malik :

   NOT SUBMITTED

3. Anand Mishra :

   How do children learn idioms

4. Anurag Awasthi :

   How do deaf people learn to read words-the importance of sign languages !!

5. Bvv Sri Raj Dutt :

   Intension and Extension

6. Chaitanya Krishna Parimi :

   Intension and Extension of a word

7. Deepesh Raj :

   Learning and understanding "words" - sound by sound

8. Kartik Venkat :

   How We Learn Idioms

9. Kshitij Singh :

   Reverse Speech: Truth or Myth?

10. Manish Kumar Singh :

    NOT SUBMITTED

11. Nishant Singh :

    How children learn the meaning of moral words

12. Nitish Srivastava :

    Latent Semantic Analysis:A solution to the Gavagai problem?

13. Pradeep Karuturi :

    NOT SUBMITTED

14. Pranav Pandit :

    LATE

15. Pushkar Aggarwal :

    Word Parsing

16. Rahul Gupta :

    NOT SUBMITTED

17. Ravisekhar Chakraborty :

    LATE

18. Rohit Vaish :

    What is a word?

19. Samarjeet :

    The Sign

20. Sandip Kumar Gupta :

    Acquiring Meaning of Verbs

21. Sanjay Chaudhary :

    LATE

22. Sarvesh Kumar Singh :

    NOT SUBMITTED

23. Sourav Khandelwal :

    Word Learning

24. Srikarun Dhurjati :

    LATE

25. Sujith thomas :

    What is a concept?

26. Surapaneni Rakesh :

    Distributive Memory model & phonemes

27. Yandrapally Rahulkrishna :

    Animals can acquire language? - The Bonobo Chimpanzee Case

---