A simplified approach to understanding the meaning or context of words or phrases based on their surface form, without considering any deeper linguistic or conceptical relationships.

• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Artificial Intelligence

For instance, a child may naively interpret the phrase ‘the big brown cow’ as referring to a specific animal, without realizing that the phrase is made up of multiple words with different meanings (e.g., ‘big’ can refer to size, and ‘brown’ can refer to color).

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