Colloquium: Incorporating Subjectivity in the Study of Meaning by Grounding It in Experience

One may assume that a semiotic representation leads to the same meaning in each person who processes it. This follows if we assume that meaning calculation is solely objective in nature. However, research in language and cognition is building up to show otherwise. Meaning calculated from semiotic input is not objective, but is influenced by and grounded in the experience of the language acquisition process and the habitual interaction of the speaker with the referents of linguistic content.

In this talk, Mai Al-Khatib will present studies that show that processing of languages involves constructing a simulation of the depicted meaning which includes a multimodal meaning construction. A number of studies show empirical evidence to the embodied simulation hypothesis (Bergen, 2015) which will be discussed followed by their cognitive model as an informational structure of this simulation. Their model retrieves informational structure of meaning from FrameNet, a network of background knowledge concepts (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016) called frames which depict total experiential situations indexed by words. The network is inspired by a theoretical semantic framework called Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976). Their cognitive model is titled the Embodied Simulation Frame Semantic blueprint. Al-Khatib will present their experimental results of testing my model on native speakers of English in support of the ES-FS blueprint model.

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