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The concept of accessibility has often been evoked to explain reference resolution. According to the Givenness Hierarchy theory, a referent’s accessibility in the mental state of a comprehender is encoded in the form of the referent as part of its lexical semantic representation. However, the current literature has not reached a consensus on what accessibility exactly means and how to best quantify it. The factors that modulate accessibility show a great extent of overlap with another independently motivated concept of predictability, raising the possibility of a “Predictability Hierarchy” that mirrors Givenness Hierarchy. In a self-paced reading study, the current study examines whether there is such “Predictability Hierarchy” by manipulating the predictability and the form of a referent presented to the participants. Our results indicate that although there is no strong evidence for approximating the Givenness Hierarchy with a “Predictability Hierarchy,” there is some preliminary evidence for a partial correlation between the form and the predictability of a referent.

CogSci 2021

Is there a predictability hierarchy in reference resolution?

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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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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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In signed languages, space can be used to build linguistic analogs for mental images and linguistically support conceptual domains such as time. This research aimed to (i) describe the spatial patterns of the Uruguayan Sign Language (LSU) time lexicon, (ii) test whether variables such as time construal, reference type, and iconicity labeling produce a clear-cut spatial pattern in the LSU time lexicon, and (iii) determine whether the LSU time lexicon might prime the mental timeline for LSU signers. We discuss how we selected a corpus, labeled space according to certain parameters, and characterized signs within unidimensional spaces. We applied a Chi-square goodness of fit test to compare multiple observed proportions among variables. The results confirmed a bias toward the Sagittal space for deictic time and biases for sequential and span time for Hand number and Reference type. We suggest considering these biases in time discrimination with deaf population.

Distribution of unidimensional space in the LSU time lexicon

Language has been characterized as a “unique” facet of human cognition with complex syntactic features like anaphora and distance dependencies. However, visual narratives, like comics, have been argued to use similar sequencing mechanisms. These narrative structures include “refiner” panels that “zoom in” on the contents of another panel. Similar to linguistic anaphora, refiners co-referentially connect inexplicit information in one unit (refiner/pronoun) to a more informative “antecedent.” Also, refiners can follow their antecedents (anaphoric) or precede them (cataphoric) with either proximal or distant connections. We explored these constraints of order and distance on visual narrative refiners by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to wordless comic strips. Anaphoric refiners evoked late sustained negativities (Nref) while distant anaphoric refiners attenuated N400s compared to all others, and all distance dependencies evoked leftward negativities. These responses are consistent with (neuro)cognitive responses shown to anaphora in language, suggesting domain-general constraints on the sequencing of referential dependencies.

Anaphoric distance dependencies in the sequential structure of wordless visual narratives

A growing evidence from a sentence-picture verification paradigm suggests rapid integration of implied perceptual context during sentence processing. This evidence, however, is usually criticized for not providing a strong test of the mechanisms underlying such integration. We addressed this question in relation to the situation describing different sources of light. We hypothesized that if comprehenders simulate the perceptual state of affairs implied by the sentence, then response times should be faster only when pictures are fully (not partially) congruent with sentence content. Participants (N=200) read sentences like “The sun/the moon is shining onto a horse” followed by pictures depicting mentioned (Experiment 1) or non-mentioned (Experiment 2) objects in either a matching or a mismatching perceptual context (sunny/moony background). Verification times (analyzed with linear-mixed-models) were shorter only when the mentioned (but not non-mentioned) objects matched the perceptual context implied by the sentence. The results are discussed in support of simulation account.

Lightness and darkness are mentally represented during language processing

This study addresses the hypothesis that the aesthetic appeal of linguistic features may influence their learnability and in turn their stability in a language. Focusing on prosodic patterns, we investigated the crucial baseline assumption that linguistic features like stress affect aesthetic appeal. Listeners’ liking, beauty and naturalness ratings of isochronous words and words with initially, medially or finally lengthened or shortened syllables revealed that, indeed, these patterns differed in their aesthetic appeal. Interestingly, the aesthetic appeal of prosodic patterns corresponded to their effectiveness for speech segmentation in other experiments, indicating a potential connection between aesthetics and language learning and opening up avenues for further research on the role of aesthetics in language acquisition and change.

Aesthetic perception of prosodic patterns as a factor in speech segmentation

Child directed language has been characterized by exaggerated prosody which can serve multiple functions including highlighting properties of meaning via iconicity. Iconic prosody may help language acquisition by bringing properties of displaced or unknown referents to the language learner’s “mind’s eye” or facilitating the acquisition of abstract features such as “direction”, or “speed”. We investigate iconic prosody in semi-naturalistic caregiver-child interactions. 50 caregivers were asked to talk to their child (2-4 years) about a set of toys either known or unknown to the child, and either present or absent from the interaction. In a first analysis, we included instances of iconic prosody as subjectively coded. In a second analysis, we looked at acoustic modulations for a set of seed words. In both analyses, we found that caregivers made use of iconic prosody more when talking about unknown or displaced objects, pointing to a neglected role for prosody in word learning.

Do you hear how BIG it is? Iconic Prosody in Child Directed Language Supports Language Acquisition

Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody, gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-face communication and interact to support processing. In this paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2 processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody, gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400. Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation, whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2 participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent.

Electrophysiological signatures of multimodal comprehension in second language

Adults and children systematically match certain kinds of words to certain kinds of shapes according to the sounds of their phonemes (e.g., ‘kiki’-spiky ‘bouba’-curvy). These sound-shape mappings rely on multisensory processing of perceived goodness of fit between vision and audition. Dyslexic individuals have shown deficits in general multisensory processing and sound-symbolic matching suggesting that multisensory processing deficits may be developmentally implicated in early reading difficulties. A longitudinal cohort study tracking bilingual children in Singapore showed that early predictors of English reading at 4 years (e.g., phonological awareness, vocabulary size and letter knowledge) did not correlate with a novel child-friendly task eliciting the bouba-kiki effect at 6 years. However, since the children had not yet started formal reading instruction, it is difficult to interpret the lack of relationship. In the current study, we followed the same cohort of children into early reading years and tested their English word and pseudoword reading abilities at 8.5 years. In our preregistered analysis, no significant relationship was observed between earlier multisensory sound-shape matching reading outcomes but known predictors of reading showed strong relationships in this cohort of bilingual children.

From Alien Zoo to Spy School: A Preregistered Study of Linguistic Sound Symbolism and its Links to Reading in 8-year-olds

Social factors, such as partner familiarity (e.g., talking to a friend vs. stranger) may affect some conversations but not others. While researchers do not always control the partner identity when conducting interactive studies, the current empirical report of a language production experiment conducted via Zoom presents effects of partner familiarity (friends vs. strangers) on the form and content of referring expressions in the mundane task of describing everyday objects. First, speakers interacting with a friend were less disfluent than speakers interacting with a stranger, showing that more effort is invested in interactions with strangers. Second, speakers interacting with a friend showed more sensitivity to prior context. Surprisingly, these effects reveal that speakers are sensitive to the partner identity even when describing everyday objects whose labels are shared across all language users. The current findings suggest that researchers should consider social factors as part of the experimental design of interactive tasks.

The identity of the partner matters even when naming everyday objects

How related is skin to a quilt or door to worry? Here, we show that linguistic experience strongly informs people’s judgments of such word pairs. We asked Chinese-speakers, English-speakers, and Chinese-English bilinguals to rate semantic and visual similarity between pairs of Chinese words and of their English translation equivalents. Some pairs were unrelated, others were also unrelated but shared a radical (e.g., “expert” and “dolphin” share the radical meaning “pig”), others also shared a radical which invokes a metaphorical relationship. For example, a quilt covers the body like skin; understand, with a sun radical, invokes understanding as illumination. Importantly, the shared radicals are not part of the pronounced word form. Chinese speakers rated word pairs with metaphorical connections as more similar than other pairs. English speakers did not even though they were sensitive to shared radicals. Chinese-English bilinguals showed sensitivity to the metaphorical connections even when tested with English words.

Metaphors Embedded in Chinese Characters Bridge Dissimilar Concepts

Theories of inflectional morphology differ in terms of how they treat semi-productive inflection types, that is, inflections that apply to multiple words but are not completely productive (e.g. grow-grew, know-knew, but not clow-clowed). How such semi-regular classes generalize may help distinguish theories, but little work has explored this question due to the difficulty of finding overgeneralized uses of these inflectional classes in naturalistic corpora. We address this issue by conducting a prompted lexical decision study on English past tenses. Participants were shown a regular or irregular verb in the infinitive form (to snow, to grow) and then presented with either a correct inflection (snowed, grew) or an overgeneralization (snew, growed) and asked to indicate whether it is the correct past tense form. We compare how various overgeneralized types (snow-snew, sneeze-snoze) differ in terms of reaction times and accuracy rates finding differences between classes which may inform future theoretical comparisons.

Is there a predictability hierarchy in reference resolution?

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Distribution of unidimensional space in the LSU time lexicon

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