Reply to Lewis et al.: Inference is key to learning appearance from language, for humans and distributional semantic models alike

Two major ways in which humans learn is by direct sensory observation and gathering information from other minds through language. In our original paper, we attempt to tease apart the contributions of sensory experience from other sources of information, including linguistic communication, by comparing knowledge of appearance among individuals blind from birth and those who are sighted. We report that blind and sighted people share structured knowledge of animal appearance (1). Lewis et al. (2) urge us not to “reject language as an important source of visual knowledge.” We did not intend to do so and agree that language is indeed likely … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: judyseinkim{at}gmail.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

• Publication date

  2019-09-05

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Linguistics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1073/pnas.1910410116PMID 31488727PMCID PMC6765293
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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