Connectionists: Public talk on neural model of lexical meaning...

Wed Mar 25 13:12:46 EDT 2026

Greetings Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce the following online talk next week:

The Dynamic Field Theory Community Presents…
A Dynamic Field Theory of lexical meaning

Presenter: Michael Stern, Yale University
When: Wednesday April 1st at 4pm GMT+1

The talk will build on work presented in the following paper…
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106336

All are welcome.

Abstract: I will discuss a recent paper in Cognition by me and Maria Piñango titled "Contextual modulation of language comprehension in a dynamic neural model of lexical meaning." The paper proposes that polysemy—the ubiquitous phenomenon of a many-to-one mapping between word meaning and word form—arises from the activation dynamics of neural populations governing interpretation on continuous semantic dimensions. This contrasts with an approach that treats linguistic meaning as consisting of discrete representations. Focusing on the English lexical item "have" as a test case, we demonstrate how our model generates contextual modulation of lexical semantic interpretation via the persistence through time of neural activation states, or hysteresis. Moreover, the model generates individual variation in the magnitude of contextual modulation via variation in the strength of interaction between neural fields. Finally, simulations generate a novel empirical prediction that the relationship between sentence reading time and acceptability should be modulated by context. An experiment combining self-paced reading and acceptability judgments replicates previous results and partially confirms the novel prediction of the model. My aim is to invite discussion about how the DFT framework can shed light on linguistic meaning.

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John P. Spencer, PhD
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