Editorial: Words in the world
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New ways to think about wordsWords are at the core of our language and our lives.They constitute the means by which we share thoughts, understandings and feelings.They unite people and separate them.They are at once unique to each individual and the shared possession of a group.This Frontiers in Communication Research Topic addresses this complexity through research that is grounded in psycholinguistic experimentation and modeling.It presents evidence and insights concerning the nature of words across languages, their representations in the minds and brains of individuals, and their relations to people's environments and behaviors.This experimental psycholinguistic research, conducted across languages and across populations, suggests that the nature of words can only be understood as developing from language experience.Words are in the world-and so are our minds and brains.This perspective is at the source of this Research Topic.It reflects the exciting developments that are taking place in the psycholinguistic study of language processing and in the cognitive sciences more generally.In many ways, these developments are entirely new.In other ways, they have their roots in foundational psycholinguistic research.It is noteworthy that it is now exactly 50 years since the publication of Derwing (1973) call for a behaviorally based approach to the study of language structure and language development.In that 1973 book, Derwing states that "a linguistic unit at any 'level' exists as a unit only because the language user treats it as a unit . . .as part of the language process of speech production and comprehension" (p.305).This perspective highlights the fact that people's word knowledge is obligatorily linked to their language behavior in the world-their experience in understanding words, in producing them, and in relating them to each other and to ideas, entities, and emotions. The inter-relationality of research on words in the world Spanning languagesThe comments above highlight the extent to which words are part of a highly integrated system that we typically call an individual's vocabulary.The characteristics of that system will differ considerably from language to language.It is not surprising, therefore, that in this Research Topic, a variety of languages are studied.These include Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".