Abstract

Questions about the nature of word meaning have drawn attention across the cognitive science disciplines. Because words are one of the basic units of language, linguists working to describe the design of human language have naturally been concerned with word meaning. Perhaps less obvious, though, is the importance of word meaning to other disciplines. Philosophers seeking to identify the nature of knowledge and its relation to the world, psychologists trying to understand the mental representations and processes that underlie language use, and computer scientists wanting to develop machines that can talk to people in a natural language have all worked to describe what individual words mean, and, more generally, what kind of thing a word meaning is.