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SUMMARY:What you get is not only what you see! A distributional analysis o
 f semantic features from congenital blind subjects - Alessandro Lenci\, Un
 iversity of Pisa
DTSTART:20130110T120000Z
DTEND:20130110T130000Z
UID:TALK42295@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ekaterina Kochmar
DESCRIPTION:The effect of blindness on the organization and structure of c
 onceptual representations has always been regarded as crucial evidence to 
 understand the relationship between sensory-motor systems and semantic mem
 ory\, as well as the link between language and perception. Features compos
 ing concepts are derived from two major kinds of experience\, sensory-moto
 r experiences and linguistic experiences. Vision undoubtedly represents th
 e main source of information for most concrete concepts\, while for abstra
 cts ones linguistic experiences clearly have a dominant role. It has been 
 variously argued that information relevant to form conceptual representati
 ons is redundantly coded in perception and in language. Each source of inf
 ormation might\, on its own or in conjunction with the other\, support the
  construction of similar conceptual spaces. In the case of congenitally bl
 ind individuals\, this hypothesis predicts that the lack of visual experie
 nces can be compensated with information acquired through language\, allow
 ing subjects to learn even those features that are uniquely related to vis
 ion.\n\nIn this talk\, I will present a computational linguistic analysis 
 of semantic features produced by blind and sighted persons to describe con
 crete and abstract nouns and verbs. The purpose of this research is to use
  corpus data to investigate the possible role played by language-derived i
 nformation in blind and sighted people with respect to different concept t
 ypes\, as a key to understand the contribution of distributional informati
 on to semantic representations.
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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