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Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child&#39;s linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.

CogSci 2021

Parents Adaptively Use Anaphora During Parent-child Social Interaction

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

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Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.

poster

We investigated racial bias in emotion inference by having participants describe the emotion of the featured person in the image, including Asian, Black, and White. We collected 4,197 sentences (63,900 tokens) and used the data to train Word2Vec, a neural network-based word embedding model. We calculated the cosine distance between emotion words and words indicating the target for each racial group in order to measure the strength of association. Although all images portrayed neutral emotions, the results show that negative emotion words were close to Asian and Black, whereas neutral words were close to White. This result indicates that stereotypes contribute to the racial bias in Artificial Intelligence as crowdsourcing workers can generate annotations depending on the featured person's race. Based on the present study, we suggest employing various de-biasing methods such as data augmentation or removing bias components in word embeddings before using Artificial Intelligence in the real world.

Racial Bias in Emotion Inference: An Experimental Study Using a Word Embedding Method

Non-native speakers have been found to be penalized for their accent and grammatical errors. However, little is known about whether and how accent and grammaticality interact to influence native listeners’ perception of non-native speech, and whether listeners’ personality plays a role in this. We examined these questions by relating the acceptability scores of 40 English speech stimuli rated by 60 British listeners (30 female; 30 unfamiliar with accented speech) to factors including speech accent (British vs. Polish), grammaticality (well-formed vs. error-filled) and listener personality. The results suggest that non-native accent “protects” the speaker from being penalized for grammatical errors unless the listener has a certain personality profile: compared to non-native accented speech, the acceptability ratings of native accented speech showed a larger decrease when grammatical errors were present, yet listeners who were more conscientious, extravert or agreeable tended to give lower acceptability ratings to non-native accented speech, regardless of grammaticality.

Native perception of non-native speech: Speaker accent mitigates penalization for language errors in non-native speech unless the listener is conscientious

A number of studies have explored whether language is grounded in action and perception, however little attention has been given to the sense of smell. Here we directly test whether olfactory information is necessary for comprehension of odor-related language, by comparing language performance in a group of participants with no sense of smell (anosmics) with a group of control participants with an intact sense of smell. We found no difference in comprehension of odor- and taste-related language between anosmics and controls using a lexical decision task, suggesting olfaction is not crucial to semantic representations of odor-related language. However, we did find that anosmics were better at remembering odor-related words than controls, and they also rated odor- and taste-related words as more positively valenced than control participants. We suggest odor-related language is more salient and emotional to anosmics because it reminds them of their missing sense. Overall, this study supports the proposal that odor-related language is not grounded in odor perception.

Can losing the sense of smell affect odor language?

Temporal gestures reveal our metaphorical thinking of time. Less is known about how speakers of different languages encode temporal gestures. We asked 19 adults to explain the meanings of 12 spatial metaphors of time in Turkish sentences. We coded gestures according to the coding scheme of Cooperrider and Nuñez (2009). Individuals produced 237 temporal gestures. There were 162 placing (68.35%), 10 pointing (4.22%), 13 duration-marking (5.49%), 12 bridging (5.06%), 40 animating (16.88%) gestures. We also identified 61 temporal gestures that did not fall into any category in their classification. These gestures depicted the change of the time of an event caused by humans (e.g., to postpone a meeting) with an open hand moving the events along an axis. We termed these as “moving” gestures and suggest that speakers of different languages may vary in their representations of temporal gestures.

Temporal Gestures in Turkish Metaphor Explanations

We explore how morphological cue occurrence and frequency-based heuristics interplay during sentence comprehension in Korean, a lesser-studied language in this respect. Two self-paced reading experiments with a suffixal passive construction (verb-final vs. verb-initial) and a morphological causative construction (verb-initial in comparison to the same word-order pattern in the suffixal passive) revealed that the heuristics (canonicity of word order; typicality of form-function parings involving case-marking) affected processing behaviours more strongly than the expected advantage of an early-arriving morphological cue in comprehension. Our findings support the heuristic-before-algorithm processing architecture, which is driven by the general property of human cognition that continuously seeks to reduce the burden of work at hand at the earliest opportunities. This appeals to the online cognitive equilibrium hypothesis that argues for the processor’s propensity to enter and remain in the state of cognitive equilibrium as early and long as possible during processing.

Keep Calm and Move On: Interplay between Morphological Cue Occurrence and Frequency-based Heuristics for Sentence Comprehension in Korean

During language comprehension, words are easier to process when predictable based on local sentence context. It is unclear how information available from the global discourse interacts with this local predictive processing. To test this, we conducted an online self-paced reading study (n=100), manipulating the predictability of a critical word in a target sentence while varying the coherency of the target sentence with a preamble context that preceded it. We found that people processed the critical word faster when it was highly predictable from local context, replicating a common finding. We also found people were slower to process the critical word when the target sentence was presented in an incoherent context. However, no interaction was observed. Results indicate that subtler semantic changes, such as topic shifts, slow language processing but do not reduce the benefit of a highly predictable, local context.

Effects of global discourse coherence on local contextual predictions

Rational Speech Act theory (Frank & Goodman, 2012) has been successfully applied in numerous communicative settings, including studies using one-shot web-based language games. Several follow-up studies of the latter, however, suggest that listeners may not behave as pragmatically as originally suggested in those tasks. We investigate whether, in such reference games, listeners’ pragmatic reasoning about an informative speaker is improved by greater exposure to the task, and/or prior experience with being a speaker in this task. While we find limited evidence that increased exposure results in more pragmatic responses, listeners do show increased pragmatic reasoning after playing the role of the speaker. Moreover, we find that only in the Speaker-first condition, participant’s tendency to be an informative speaker predicts their degree of pragmatic behavior as a listener. These findings demonstrate that, in these settings, experience as a speaker enhances the ability of listeners to reason pragmatically, as modeled by RSA.

Speak before you listen: Pragmatic reasoning in multi-trial language games

Typological analysis of the world’s language shows that, of the 6 possible basic word orders, SOV and SVO orders are predominant, a preference supported by experimental studies in which participants improvise gestures to describe events. Silent gesture studies have also provided evidence for natural ordering patterns, where SOV and SVO orders are used selectively depending on the semantics of the event, a finding recently supported by data from natural sign languages. We present an artificial language learning task using gesture to ask to what extent preferences for natural ordering patterns, in addition to biases for regular languages, are at play during learning in the manual modality.

Regularisation, Systematicity and Naturalness in a Silent Gesture Learning Task

This study investigated (1) whether and how English caregivers adjust their speech (i.e., mean length of utterances, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, sentence types, and deixis) according to different contexts, children’s knowledge, and age, and (2) which aspects of parental speech input predict children’s immediate learning of novel words as well as their vocabulary size. We studied a semi-naturalistic corpus, in which English caregivers talked to their children (3-4 years old) about toys that were present or absent, and known or unknown to the children. We found that caregivers flexibly adjusted various aspects of their speech to maintain an informative and engaging learning environment. Furthermore, we found that rich lexicon and yes-no questions predict better immediate word learning, whereas caregivers' lexical diversity, lexical frequency, the use of Yes-No questions are related to children’s general vocabulary size. In conclusion, higher quality of caregivers’ language predicts better immediate word learning and vocabulary size.

The impact of child-directed language on children’s lexical development

The paper addresses both issues of first language (L1) attrition and second language (L2) acquisition in the context of two mutually intelligible languages from a psycholinguistic perspective. It summarises results of a study examining how native speakers of Slovak living long-term in Czechia process and produce Slovak and Czech cognates and noncognates. Two experimental sessions consisting of lexical decision task and picture naming task were conducted once with Slovak stimuli and once with Czech stimuli. The results showed that Slovak noncognates were processed and produced more slowly by Slovaks who use their L1 less, and their L2 more. Analogically, this subgroup processed and produced Czech noncognates relatively faster. Thus, the experiments give evidence of (a) L1 attrition (online processing difficulties), and (b) the shift towards L2 patterns depending on the amount of L1 and L2 use even in speakers of two very close and mutually intelligible languages.

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Next from CogSci 2021

Racial Bias in Emotion Inference: An Experimental Study Using a Word Embedding Method

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