No, those aren't adjectives describing my perpetual impostor syndrome, nor do those words come from a line from another Dorothy Parker poem -- they are, rather, some words on how a philosopher quoted in a 1993 Psych Review paper on concepts described the notion of similarity. I tend to disagree -- I am quite happy with considering similarity to be a useful notion in thinking about categories. When we are trying to overcome a tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (something that happens to me quite frequently, especially when I've been talking a lot), we often try to "grab" words from our "mental hat" (at least, this is how I've conceptualized it) and sometimes miss and grab ones which are similar in some dimension. At least this is my anecdotal folk theory... though I'm fairly certain that science partially supports my understanding. For instance -- maybe I'm trying to remember that the capital of New York is Albany, and I'll be reminded of Anaheim, another "A" city which is not the most striking city in a state with a very striking city (NYC, L.A.). There's something complicated about how that might all break down, but similarity computation seems to be a parsimonious explanation for at least part of that strange cognitive journey.
There are theories in sentence processing which posit that similarity-based interference between structures sharing features (semantic, syntactic, other?) can cause some problems in sentence processing. Recently I've been thinking more about how similarity might be _helpful_ for sentence processing. Maybe in some cases, it might be hard to keep track of things someone's talking about because they're all so similar, but in other cases, it might be great that items in long-term memory are stored in such a way that similar things can interfere -- because those other similar things might just be relevant in the near future.
All of these mumblings are mostly due to the "core" seminar class that first-years here are meant to take. I happen to find the course really well done. Somehow it is a seminar course which manages really to function as a seminar course, with each of us taking turns leading the discussion (today it was my turn), and everyone reading papers thoughtfully and responding in kind. I really like the chance to take overview courses (or T.A. them) as it always reminds me about parts of cognition I rarely think about, and how that relates to questions I'm really interested in. Now off to think some more about feature relevance, event structure, and specificity -- after of course posting one of the cutest little vignettes I have ever come across in psycholinguistics (taken from Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2007, and originally in Dutch):
"A woman saw a dancing peanut who had a big smile on his face. The peanut was singing about a girl he had just met. And judging from the song, the peanut was totally crazy about her. The woman thought it was really cute to see the peanut singing and dancing like that. The peanut was {salted / in love}, and by the sound of it, this was definitely mutual. He was seeing a little almond."
(Guess which continuation was easier for participants?)
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