Our Project

BraveNewWord aims at investigating the semantic side of novel word processing in adult speakers, with an interdisciplinary approach combining experimental psychology, computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. 

We learn new words almost on a daily basis: as adults, a new element is introduced in our vocabulary every other day. With new words, we also learn about new objects and ideas – in most cases new words are not simply additional labels to be applied to familiar objects: they connote meanings that are unknown to the speaker of a language. However, when we experience, as adults, an unfamiliar word, typically its referent is not immediately available in the same context. How then can language, by itself, constitute such a reliable instrument for the acquisition of novel meanings? What do we exploit to induce new meanings on the basis of an unfamiliar sequence of sounds or graphical elements?

BraveNewWord addresses these questions combining modelling approaches from computational linguistics and empirical investigation from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. BraveNewWord posits three main sources for lexically-driven meaning acquisition: linguistic context, word morphological structure, general-purpose form-meaning mapping. The project aims at developing a computational framework that models these mechanisms through data-driven, psychologically plausible distributional systems trained on examples of natural language usage. The quantitative characterizations offered by these computational efforts will constitute, in turn, the basis for BraveNewWord large-scale empirical investigation, involving both behavioral (reaction times, mouse-tracking trajectories, diachronic language changes) and neuroscience data (event-related potentials, neuroimaging).