Sumner readings

The King & Sumner article really fascinated me. The model of exemplar-category resonance seemed very similar to my Psych 45 class regarding memory. It seems our memory often makes activation of other parts of the memory easier, rather than we actually have that memory in full stored to be re-imagined at any moment. Furthermore, the more those parts around a memory are activated, the stronger the memory becomes. I can see this holding true in linguistics as well - the more often nurse is preceded by doctor, the stronger that association becomes and the quicker we can activate and identify the word "nurse." It is shocking that relatively little has been done regarding the effects of language characteristics, as words do take on totally different meanings by accent, gender of speaker, and age. This hypothesis that our understanding, our rationality, is being shaped by subconscious probability calculations appear often in SymSys, though it seems overly simplistic to me. If we could account for memories and language through only probabilities, I think artificial intelligence would be a much easier, and far less interesting, field. Nonetheless, it does provide an interesting framework to understand our subconscious as perhaps a more calculated machine that is inaccessibly to us, but may be incredibly mathematical. It is very interesting that there was "robust effects of speaker-specific word associations," and that the significantly stronger associations could have been influenced by fewer unique word associations - meaning much higher probability since from a smaller sample. 

The Sumner article on the social weight of spoken words seemed relevant, especially for promoting diversity and engaging for minorities. It seems quite true that having mainly white male professors could make one process the information with far less attention and internalize lectures completely differently than those of the same gender and race. It is unsurprising to me that humans subconsciously want words to match - meaning happy words said in a happy tone and more obscure, older words said by elders. It exactly matches with how stereotypes work in a brain as a shortcut to form quick representations when in situations, and yet this shortcut causes much difficulty when we realize that many stereotypes and strong associations are not valid and need to be consciously overridden. As Sumner recognizes, "biases and discriminatory behavior" is introduced early in word recognition than we may hope.

Lastly, the Sumner and Kataoka article seemed heavily related to the first article - and to again match with Psych 45 and how memories are both stored in the brain and strengthened with frequency of recall. It seems logical that unique words would be remembered well as well, because we note when things stray from patterns set in our mind. I appreciated the complexity acknowledged in the article and how frequency, in other words, simple probabilities could not fully account for association and memory strength.