May 16, 2016
Research Highlight
The Universal Structure of Human Lexical Semantics
A new study explores how properties of organization and cognition in the human brain could be universal. Researchers focused on semantics, or ‘meaning expressed through language,’ and developed an empirical measure of how semantics might reflect cultural, historical, and environmental backgrounds. The results highlight a universal structure underlying the sampled vocabulary across different language groups and largely independent of geography or environment.
The paper, “On the universal structure of human lexical semantics,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The work was supported in part by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) element of the NASA Astrobiology Program.