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Project

Bitstring Semantics at the interface between linguistics and psychology

This doctoral research is conducted within the interdisciplinary BITSHARE project, which aims to explore the many potential applications of Bitstring Semantics that were recently developed within philosophical logic. By uniting various disciplines that are concerned with the study of meaning and reasoning (linguistics, psychology, philosophy and computer science), the project hopes to establish the utility of Bitstring Semantics as a shared representation formalism for a broad, interdisciplinary community of reasoning researchers. Within this common framework, insights from different disciplines can then be efficiently expressed and combined with each other. The current PhD project is situated at the interface between linguistics and psychology. The central research question is: Are more complex bitstring representations also more difficult for human reasoners? To investigate the psychological relevance of distinctions between natural language expressions, a number of experiments will be conducted and analyzed using Bitstring Semantics. Four types of linguistic expressions/categories are investigated, namely the standard quantifiers ‘some/all’, the evaluative quantifiers ‘few/many/most’, the normative quantifiers ‘enough/too many/too few’ and the spatial connectives ‘to the (far) left/right of’. The first and central type of experimental design we employ is a sentence-picture verification task, in which participants have to respond whether a certain sentence is true or false given the picture that is shown. The difficulty of this task is operationalized in terms of both the accuracy and reaction times of the human participants. Secondly, this initial design is elaborated upon with the application of a dual task approach, which can be seen as a more direct test of the cognitive complexity claim. The cognitive resources of participants are hereby burdened by the imposing of a resource-demanding secondary task during the presentation and processing of the information. In a third series of experiments, we focus on the process measures of eye-movements and thinking aloud. By combining the data gathered through these three types of studies, we aim to establish Bitstring Semantics as both a valuable tool within psycho-linguistic reasoning research as well as a useful shared representation formalism for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Date:1 Mar 2020 →  1 Mar 2024
Keywords:Bitstring Semantics, Logic, Formal Linguistics, Experimental Psychology, Human Reasoning
Disciplines:Logic, Logic, methodology and epistemology of linguistics, Cognitive processes, Human experimental psychology not elsewhere classified, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, Semantics
Project type:PhD project