Meaning and the Situated Mind: How Context Guides Mental Representations Formed from Language

Abstract

How do humans understand the meaning of words? Generative views of language presume that word meanings are stored in a mental lexicon and retrieved when a word is encountered. On the other hand, new research on language suggests that word meanings are heavily derived from and dependent upon situational context. Furthermore, new research on situated social cognition emphasizes the situated nature of human reasoning, showing how stable thought processes are actually highly sensitive to context and situations. In this dissertation, I argue that humans construct mental representations of word meaning by drawing upon contextual and situational information, in line with both new research on language and views of situated social cognition. I present three papers that support this hypothesis. In chapter two, I demonstrate how people draw upon surface metaphors relating cancer to an enemy to understand cancer and how to prevent it. In chapter three, I show that people draw upon incidental sensory states of heaviness to infer whether a book’s synopsis relays its importance. And in chapter four, I establish that the generalized affect of a word’s collocational profile (i.e., its semantic prosody) guides meaning inferences. The final (fifth) chapter summarizes factors that guide what meaning is interpreted from words and statements. These factors are organized at different levels of analysis (word-, sentence-, text-, and reader-level), and come from a variety of disciplines. The model ultimately demonstrates that inferences of meaning are highly sensitive to context, and implications for social psychology are discussed.