James C. Phillips, a scholar at Stanford law school’s Constitutional Law Center (and author of several National Review essays), has kindly forwarded to me an interesting new paper of his, “The ...

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts ...

Researchers have now developed a technique that advances the ability of these tools, such as ChatGPT, to make compositional generalizations. This technique, Meta-learning for Compositionality, ...

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers’ sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored ...

We humans excel at generalization. If you taught a toddler to identify the color red by showing her a red ball, a red truck and a red rose, she will most likely correctly identify the color of a ...

Scientists have long considered the complexity of language to be an obvious separation between humans and all other life forms on Earth. New research, however, suggests our linguistic abilities might ...

This research received funds from the Swiss National Science Foundation and Harvard University. Humans can effortlessly talk about an infinite number of topics, from neuroscience to pink elephants, by ...