Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360

Towards a Cognitive Model of Linguistic Reference

Ingo Duwe & Hans Strohner (Eds.)

Preface

In this report some of our recent efforts towards a cognitive model of linguistic reference are presented. Among others, the following aspects are comprised by the model aimed at:
  1. Many referential tasks deal with the selection of a certain object out of a visual scene. In our model, the visual information has been dynamically structured with both focused and background regions.
  2. According to our model, cognitive reference resolution is based on a relationship between two concepts. One concept is related to the linguistic input, the other to the visual input to our world knowledge. The relations between these concepts may be clearcut or more or less complicated ones.
  3. Both visual information and concepts depend on larger knowledge structures, which could be called mental models. The question which we try to answer is: How are mental models related to more basic visual and conceptual units?
The three papers comprised in the present report address the issues of vision, concepts, and mental models from different perspectives each. The first paper (Strohner, Sichelschmidt, Duwe & Kessler) describes and discusses some experiments. The second paper (Duwe, Kessler & Strohner) takes up this discussion by specifying the notion of reference from a cognitive point of view. The third paper (Strohner, Duwe & Kessler) discusses the relation between concepts and mental models.
Postscript-File (~1210 k)
Anke Weinberger, 1997-02-14, 1997-02-28