One word for understanding

The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it’s like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the «HasProperty» API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there’s a much better way of doing this: parse books!

Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files — mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.

Hopefully it’s more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way — for example, gender is interesting: «woman» versus «man» and «boy» versus «girl». On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, «beautiful» is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world’s literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for «woman» — too many to show here).

The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The «uniqueness» sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives’ uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it’s actually pretty simple). As you’d expect, you can click the «Sort By Usage Frequency» button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.

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One word stage of language development

Infants will tend to acquire the ability to pronounce the full range of vowels in their language first. The pronunciation of vowels happens with an open configuration (the tongue isn’t involved in limiting or stopping the breath) of the vocal tract, which makes the pronunciation simpler than consonants.

Infants gain the ability to pronounce the full range of consonants in their language after vowels. The pronunciation of consonants happens when the vocal tract is either partly or fully obstructed, making them technically more difficult to pronounce than vowels.

Consonants tend to be acquired in the following order:

• Nasals (n, m).
• Glides (w, j).
• Stops (p, b, t, d, k, g).
• Liquids (l, r).
• Fricatives (f, v, s, z).
• Affricates (ch, j).

Once the infant has become familiar with the consonant and feels more confident, they may utter a new word with the constant letter in the middle or end of the word.

Infants can perceive more sound contrasts than they can verbally utter during the one-word stage. Their speech won’t reveal their full understanding of phonology, but it can be observed when they substitute an easier sound for one they cannot produce yet.

The substitutions that they make are rule-governed: they always use the same sound as a substitute for a sound they can’t produce. ¹

The following table shows some common examples:

Infants often overextend the meaning of a word. This occurs when they give a word a broader meaning than its intended meaning.

If a child refers to any small animal it sees as a ‘rat’, even if it’s a squirrel, dog, or cat. The infant has extended the meaning of the word ‘rat’ because of the child’s limited vocabulary.

Overextensions are based on shape, size and texture, but never colour.

The opposite of overextending is called underextending. This is when an infant gives a word a narrower meaning than its intended meaning.

A child might ask for ‘juice’ anytime it wants its sippy cup.

Interpretation during the one-word stage

The challenge during the one-word stage comes in the interpretation of the child’s holophrases. The issue is that the infant’s intention may not be interpreted correctly by the adult, and finding evidence for what the infant wants to say isn’t easy. ²

When trying to understand the meaning of a word, an adult must interpret the infant’s body language and consider the context. Infants use hand gestures and display facial expressions which can often add helpful information to solve what the child wants to communicate in conjunction with the single word uttered.³