文章基本信息

标题：Distributional semantics as a source of visual knowledge
本地全文：下载
作者：Jennifer Bair ; Patrick Manning ; David Ruvolo 等
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2019
卷号：116
期号：39
页码：19237-19238
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1910148116
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：In PNAS Kim et al. (1) detail congenitally blind individuals’ extensive knowledge of the visual appearance of animals. This is exciting and important work speaking directly to long-standing questions about the role of direct perceptual experience in semantic knowledge. Despite lacking visual input, blind people show substantial alignment with one another and with sighted people in judging animal shape, skin texture, size, and, to a much lesser extent, color. Where does this knowledge come from? One possibility, advanced by the authors, is inferential reasoning. Knowing that birds have feathers and that ostriches are birds allows blind people to infer that ostriches have feathers despite never having seen an ostrich (or feathers). Another possibility is the distributional structure of language. The authors reject the “obvious idea … that blind individuals learn from sighted people’s verbal descriptions” on the grounds that the lowest … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed.