The Psychology of Word Meanings.

This volume includes four papers presented at a conference on The Psychology of Word Meaning held at the University of Georgia in 1989 plus six others which were solicited for the volume. There is also a brief but useful introduction by the editor, Paula Schwanenflugel. The first five papers address more or less directly the nature of word meanings. The remainder are primarily concerned with related issues definitions, the influe.nce of meaning in word recognition, abstract YS. concrete words, and the role of the right hemisphere although almost all of them include a brief comment about the relevance of the reported research to the nature of word meanings. There was near universal support expressed for a prototype approach of some kind, with individuals supporting an exemplar storage version and/or a connectionist implementation. Some of the papers present original research while others survey a number of studies in a given area. The contributions vary in quality, but overall the volume is a good one. Gregory Murphy’s “Meanings and Concepts” addresses the crucial issue of the relation between meanings and concepts. It includes a clear and sound review of some of the classical views of meaning, giving particular attention to the arguments that led Putnam (1975, p. 227) to assert that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head”. Murphy concludes that word meanings are in fact concepts, or combinations of concepts. This conclusion is already implicit in hlurphy’s definition of “concept” (“mental representations of coherent classes of entities” (p, II)) , which is general enough to include mental representations of word meanings. This contribution might have been improved with more consideration of how one might separate‘concepts from word meanings in a principled way, or try to assess experimentally whether there is a difference between the two. This problem becomes evident when hlurphy considers empirical evidence on the issue. The fact that typicality effects, characteristics of basis level concepts, and children’s acquisition of concepts are all assessed using linguistic data is taken as evidence that word meanings are in fact concepts. The discussion itself occasionally equivocates on the distinction. Words in general, and nouns in particular are described as “typical” (e.g., “The ratings declined linearly with the decreasing typicaZity of the new word”, p. 23, emphasis added). Compare also the following passage, which shows a seamless metamorphosis from discussing concepts t o words: