Welcome to the ERC-funded project BraveNewWord

Across the whole lifespan, lexical acquisition is a process always at place. Indeed, we learn a new word every other day, even if the word referent is not present in the environment and no explicit instruction concerning the word meaning or usage is provided. Often we do not even realize that the word we are experiencing is, in fact, unfamiliar. The reason novel word acquisition is so seamlessly achieved is that, with novel words, we also typically acquire novel meanings: such parallel semantic enrichment makes the newly encountered word meaningful, and can be considered the very purpose of lexical acquisition. Despite its pervasiveness, such a remarkable phenomenon is rarely studied in adults and, as a result, poorly understood. BraveNewWord aims at filling this gap by bringing together approaches from computational linguistics to quantitatively formalize the semantic side of novel word acquisition, and methods from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to validate the predictions of the resulting models in a cognitive perspective.

BraveNewWord posits three main cognitive mechanisms of semantic enrichment via novel words. First, the novel meaning can be induced via the sentence context in which the new word appears. Indeed, most novel words are not found in isolation, and the surrounding linguistic environment is informative about their meaning: when we hear “The small, hairy wug was sleeping below a tree” we have an intuition that the unfamiliar “wug” might denote some kind of animal. Second, substantial information can be obtained on the basis of the word morphological structure; in fact, most of the novel words are composed by familiar sublexical units, i.e. morphemes: the meaning of “quickify” is immediately evident since we are familiar with both “quick” and “ify”. Third, natural languages present a certain degree of systematicity, i.e. nuanced association between form and meaning; such reliable statistical patterns can be exploited to have an intuition about a novel word, even if it does not include any particularly salient or familiar sublexical element (e.g. futmaw).

In BraveNewWord, the three described mechanisms are integrated in a unique computational framework to provide a new understanding of the relation between language and meaning, and the cognitive underpinnings on which such relation is built.