Netherlands

Agreement attraction has been extensively studied in both the production and comprehension of language. In comprehension, it has been found that ungrammatical sentences such as ‘*The key to the cabinets were rusty’ are often judged as acceptable due to the word ‘cabinets’ that matches the verb in number, but not when the attractor is singular (‘cabinet’). This illusion of grammaticality has been documented in many of the world&#39;s languages. We report a speeded acceptability judgement experiment that tested the presence of this illusion in Czech. We find that Czech comprehenders notice the ungrammatical agreement pattern reliably, and that their acceptability judgements are affected by the number-match of the attractor. This number agreement attraction effect is however minuscule when compared to what has been reported in the literature on English. We show this in a comparative analysis of our data with those from Wagers et al. (2009).

**Authors:**

Radim Lacina: Osnabrück University; Jakub Dotlačil: Utrecht University

CogSci 2024

Grammaticality illusions in Czech: A speeded acceptability study of agreement attraction

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Agreement attraction has been extensively studied in both the production and comprehension of language. In comprehension, it has been found that ungrammatical sentences such as ‘*The key to the cabinets were rusty’ are often judged as acceptable due to the word ‘cabinets’ that matches the verb in number, but not when the attractor is singular (‘cabinet’). This illusion of grammaticality has been documented in many of the world's languages. We report a speeded acceptability judgement experiment that tested the presence of this illusion in Czech. We find that Czech comprehenders notice the ungrammatical agreement pattern reliably, and that their acceptability judgements are affected by the number-match of the attractor. This number agreement attraction effect is however minuscule when compared to what has been reported in the literature on English. We show this in a comparative analysis of our data with those from Wagers et al. (2009).

**Authors:**

Radim Lacina: Osnabrück University; Jakub Dotlačil: Utrecht University

poster

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

In sign languages, gazing towards one’s interlocutor is necessary to perceive the language visually. Proficient signers have been found to look at their interlocutor’s face, rather than hands, while communicating in ASL. We investigated signers’ looks to the face vs. hands while perceiving ASL signs, fingerspelled words, pseudo signs, and fingerspelled pseudowords. Participants’ gaze was monitored as they viewed a picture followed by a short, isolated video clip of the corresponding sign or fingerspelled word. We found that participants tended to look at the face more than the hands when perceiving signs vs. pseudosigns, and when perceiving signs vs. fingerspelled words. Age of acquisition did not significantly impact gaze patterns. Results suggest that sign perceivers actively adjust their allocation of gaze based on the perceptual demands of the input.

**Authors:**

Paris Gappmayr: Boston University; Amy Lieberman: Boston University

Deaf signers allocate gaze based on type and familiarity of signed input

This study extends the application of Diffusion Drift Modeling (DDM) to examine the lexical access of monosyllabic Chinese real words and pseudo-words in an auditory lexical decision task. Here, the pseudo-words were constructed from phonological segments based on real words, allowing us to assess lexicality derived from suprasegmental information—specifically, tones—and to match their frequency to that of corresponding base forms. Following Ratcliff (1994), we manipulated the drift rate to vary with log-transformed frequency and lexicality while maintaining other DDM parameters as constant. Our results revealed that pseudo-words generally led to slower drift rate compared to real words. Additionally, for real words, an increase in log-frequency was associated with higher drift rate, whereas for pseudo-words, an increase in frequency unexpectedly corresponded to lower drift rate. This differential impact of frequency on drift rate may suggest the distinct cognitive pathways activated in the processing of suprasegmental information in lexical access.

**Authors:**

Yifei He: Philipps University Marburg; Anna Petukhova: Philipps University Marburg; Prof. Dr. Jinxin Yue: Harbin Institute of Technology

Frequency interacts with lexicality during auditory lexical decision: Insights from diffusion drift modeling

In English binomial expressions, “bread and butter” is preferred over “butter and bread”. Morgan & Levy (2015) show that for these types of expressions, frequently used phrases tend to have stronger preferences (they are more regularized). In contrast, there is roughly an equal preference for “bishops and rooks” versus “rooks and bishops”, a much less common pairing. This paper extends this research to the concept of Mandarin elastic word length, a phenomenon in which most Mandarin words have long and short forms. We find evidence for frequency-dependent regularization in the elastic length of Noun-Noun compounds in Chinese, demonstrating that frequency-dependent regularization extends to structures with more than two alternations and to languages other than English.

**Authors:**

Skyler Jove Reese: University of California, Davis; Zoey Liu: University of Florida; Masoud Jasbi: UC Davis; Emily Morgan: UC Davis

Frequency-Dependent Regularization in Mandarin Elastic Word Length

Causality is a shared general experience, but languages differ in the way they encode it. This research explores the possible correlation between society type, language and causal attribution in the way Spanish speakers think and judge causality. 202 native speakers of European and American Spanish participated in three different studies: (i) an adaptation of Singelis’ (1994) psychological questionnaire for social in(ter)dependency; (ii) a non-verbal categorisation task for the attribution of causal responsibility; and (iii) a multimodal description task for causal events. Data were elicited with a set of 58 causal videoclips from the CAL project (NSF,BCS-1535846).
Results show that all Spanish speakers, regardless of their Western (Spain) or Eastern (Latin America) backgrounds, categorise and linguistically describe causality based on the degree of the action’s intentionality. A strong correlation between language and causal categorisation was found, supporting the idea that language is a determining factor in the causal attribution.

**Authors:**

Andrea Ariño Bizarro: University of Zaragoza; Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano: University of Zaragoza

Language influences how Spanish speakers from different cultural backgrounds think, talk, and gesture about causality

Many of the most interesting and vexing problems in linguistic analysis concern structures that have a hybrid character---they show evidence of belonging to two, independently motivated structural types. Proposals often assign them to one or the other class, requiring complication of the theory to handle their exceptionality. We suggest that there is no satisfactory answer to such conundrums under standard, type-based representational theories, for those theories are founded on discrete topologies. As an alternative, we propose Metric Grammars--grammatical systems founded on connected topologies (specifically on manifolds on which we can define continuous-valued metrics---e.g., Euclidean distance). Such topologies are the natural residence of dynamical systems. Indeed, dynamical systems theory has identified a formal phenomenon--the bifurcation---that naturally models phenomena that lie between types. In fact, bifurcations are often used to model structural transitions. Therefore, to explore the possible relevance of our novel representational approach, we focus on transitional linguistic phenomena, namely diachronic grammaticalization episodes. These are cases where, over the course of the history of a language, a morpheme (or combination of morphemes) gradually changes its grammatical status. We build a metric grammar---a recurrent map that has a neural network at its core---which has the property of changing its grammatical system slightly with each instance of language experience. Focusing on a particular episode from the history of English---the development of "sort of" and "kind of" from Noun-Preposition structures into adverbs---we provide evidence that the metric grammar exhibits statistical anticipation of categorical change, a phenomenon that has been documented for several grammaticalization episodes and is difficult to account for with discrete-topology models.

**Authors:**

Whitney Tabor: University of Connecticut; Hyosun Lee: UConn – Storrs and Regional Campuses

Metric Grammars

Code-switching, that is, the alternation between different languages in a single utterance, provides a unique window into language control mechanisms. Prior studies suggest that bilinguals upregulate their cognitive control when reading sentences that start in one language and end in another (e.g., Adler et al. 2020; Bosma & Pablos, 2020). The current project investigates whether more common types of code-switches and different modalities engage cognitive control differently. We had early Spanish-English bilinguals listen to (Experiments 1, 2), or read (Experiment 3) sentences that were in Spanish only, or included dense or insertional switches to English. After each sentence participants responded to a Flanker trial. In contrast to prior findings, we either found no effect (Exp. 1), or a larger Flanker conflict effect after a switch vs. a unilingual sentence (Exp. 2 and 3). We therefore have no evidence that processing common types of code-switches upregulates cognitive control.

**Authors:**

Edith Kaan: University of Florida; Rodrigo Mello Medina: University of Florida; Guadalupe Maria Diaz: University of Florida; Kirthana Sane: University of Florida; Savannah Chandler: University of Florida; Matt Neitz: University of Florida; Claire Kuntz: University of Florida; Jorge Valdés Kroff: University of Florida; Souad Kheder: University of Florida

Testing the effects of distinct code-switching types on cognitive control

Some German adjective-compound-noun constructions (‘severe storm.warning’) exhibit a bracketing paradox where an adjective semantically modifies the first noun N1 instead of the grammatically required last noun N2 thus violating compositionality. We present two experiments that examined the interpretation of nominal compounds and bracketing paradoxes. Experiment 1 showed that the semantic match of N1 and the adjective has a significant impact on the acceptability of Adj-N1N2 constructions. Experiment 2 probed the participants’ adjective attachment choices as well as the relationship between and attachment and acceptability: While N2 attachments were most common, many constructions received mixed and some consistently bracketing paradox interpretations. High ratings for Adj-N2 were predictive of N2 attachment, but high Adj-N1 ratings led to bracketing paradox interpretations. These results are partially against grammatical expectations and suggest competition between the nouns for modification, likely due to semantic and/or pragmatic factors.

**Authors:**

Anna Pryslopska: University of Stuttgart; Titus von der Malsburg: University of Stuttgart

Severe Storm Warnings for Four-Story Homeowners: Towards a Processing Model of Bracketing Paradoxes

The automaticity of syntax has been a long-debated topic in psycholinguistics. One strategy to establish it involves finding significant evidence of syntactic priming in experimental tasks that restrict conscious awareness. Two common criteria to assess the unconscious nature of priming are that visibility (d’) of masked words is not significantly different from zero, and that visibility is not positively correlated with the size of the priming effect. Unfortunately, these outcomes may also arise from low statistical power in visibility data and low reliability of dependent measures. We report results of a meta-analysis and a Bayesian re-analysis, which revealed low statistical power and evidence that "subliminal" words were actually visible for participants. Additionally, reliability analyses on Berkovitch and Dehaene’s (2019) dataset showed that noisy measures may account for the lack of correlation between visibility and priming. These findings question the validity of previous results supporting the automatic nature of syntactic processing.

**Authors:**

David Hernández-Gutiérrez: Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL); Dr Miguel A. Sorrel: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; David Shanks: University College London; Dr Miguel A. Vadillo: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Is masked syntactic priming unconscious?

Cognitively reappraising a stressful situation—reinterpreting it to lessen its emotional impact—is effective for regulating negative emotions. When reappraising, English speakers engage in linguistic distancing, spontaneously using words that are more abstract and impersonal. Previous work showed that this pattern generalizes to Spanish but was equivocal as to whether features specific to Spanish—like estar (“to be” for temporary states)—are recruited during reappraisal. Here we revisited this possibility. Spanish-English bilinguals from majority Spanish-speaking countries (N = 138) transcribed their thoughts in each of their languages while responding naturally to negative images or reappraising them. Reappraisal increased conventional markers of linguistic distancing in both languages and Spanish-specific markers in Spanish. The latter result was driven by the use of estar, which was associated with reduced negative affect after reappraising. Our findings show that speakers of different languages deploy somewhat different linguistic tools when regulating their emotions.

**Authors:**

Kevin J. Holmes: Reed College; Lena Kassin: Reed College; Daniela Buchillon-Almeida: Reed College; Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez: Reed College

How Language Use Reflects Emotion Regulation: Evidence from Spanish

We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash’ children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear’ or ‘the small plate’) and pay attention to their interlocutor’s face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker’s referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor’s face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.

**Authors:**

Paula Rubio-Fernández: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Madeleine Long: University of Edinburgh; Vishakha Shukla: New York University; Vrinda Bhatia: Jawaharlal Nehru University; Anwesha Mahapatra: Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr. Chetan Ralekar: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Shlomit Ben-Ami: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pawan Sinha: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Deaf signers allocate gaze based on type and familiarity of signed input

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No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps