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A lot of studies on the N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) component have tried to understand its functional significance. Recently, the N400 was modeled in a neural network model as the update of a probabilistic representation of sentence meaning. The change in activation induced by a word was proposed to reflect a semantic prediction error that drives adaptation of the model’s connections (Rabovsky et al., 2018), which implies that more negative N400 amplitudes should lead to greater adaptation. By experimentally manipulating expectancy in a sentence reading task (n=33), we could show that this manipulation did not only influence N400 amplitudes, but also implicit memory: reaction times in a perceptual identification task were significantly faster for previously unexpected words. Additionally, difference in N400 amplitude correlated with the reaction time benefit for unexpected compared to expected items. These finding support the interpretation of the N400 as a prediction error and learning signal.

CogSci 2021

The N400 event-related potential component reflects a learning signal

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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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This study investigated the effect of gustatory stimuli on the associative learning of new (meaningless) word forms in a first language. Japanese native speakers performed the following tasks: (1) subjective evaluations of gustatory stimuli; (2) learning tasks of associative pairs of a new word form and gustatory stimulus (G) or only new word forms (W); (3) recognition memory tasks associated with the G/W condition; (4) free recall task for the G/W conditions. The accuracy rates of W were highest, whereas there was no significant difference between free recall scores. Subjective evaluations of gustatory stimuli negatively correlated with the free recall performance of word forms associated with the gustatory stimuli, while accuracy rates of the recognition and free recall tasks of G were positively correlated. Accordingly, learning new word forms on their own is more effective than associative learning of new word forms and gustatory stimuli in one day of learning.

Associative learning of new word forms in a first language and gustatory stimuli

Corpus data suggests that frequent words have lower rates of replacement and regularization. It is not clear, however, whether this holds due to stronger selection against innovation among high-frequency words or due to weaker drift at high frequencies. Here, we report two experiments designed to probe this question. Participants were tasked with learning a simple miniature language consisting of two nouns and two plural markers. After exposing plural markers to drift and selection of varying strengths, we tracked noun regularization. Regularization was greater for low- than for high-frequency nouns, with no detectable effect of selection. Our results therefore suggest that lower rates of regularization of more frequent words may be due to drift alone.

Regularization of nouns due to drift, not selection: An artificial-language experiment

What makes a word easy to learn? We know that early-learned words tend to be frequent and name concrete referents. Here we investigate a novel predictor--a word's surprisal -- the ease of predicting it given a context. We computed surprisal for words in child-directed speech and used it to predict age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for known predictors such as concreteness, frequency, and the mean length of the utterances in which the word appeared. Predicates with greater surprisal (i.e., those less predictable from context) were learned later. Noun learning was not dependent on surprisal. Surprisal was a powerful mediator of both frequency and concreteness, reducing the ordinarily strong effect of frequency and concreteness on AoA. Differences in surprisal across languages also proved to be moderately predictive of differences in AoA across languages: translation equivalents that had higher surprisal had later AoAs.

Does surprisal affect word learning? Evidence from seven languages

An influential claim about co-speech gestures is that they are used as a supplement to unsaid meaning in speech. However, when the gesture is fully synchronized with speech, the supplementary role appears unnecessary. The present study examined whether people use gestures differently when they produce Japanese noun phrases that contain verbs. This study compared an ambiguous noun phrase “Rakka-shiteiru (falling) otoko-no (man’s) keitai (cell-phone),” which can be interpreted following the left branching (LB) structure as “The falling man’s cell-phone ({{falling, man}, cell-phone})” or the right branching (RB) structure as “The man’s cell-phone, which is falling ({falling, {man, cell-phone}}).” This study predicted that the onset of the first gesture would be delayed with the RB structure, as the important chunk {man, cell-phone} is produced later in the utterance than in the LB structure. The results supported the prediction, indicating that the onset of the first gesture tended to be delayed when RB was produced. This finding suggests that people may disambiguate syntactically ambiguous linguistic structures through gesture use.

The Use of Co-Speech Gestures in Conveying Japanese Phrases with Verbs

Studies on the processing, functional, and social distribution of spoken and signed languages suggest partial overlaps between the mental lexicon of deaf and hearers. However, factors such as ontogenetic development, language acquisition conditions, the development of deaf culture, and the lexical repertoire available in each language suggest important differences. The aim was to explore the semantic networks of the conceptual domains of space and time in the Uruguayan deaf signers' population and Spanish hearers. 60 participants carried out a word association task in their respective languages and with semantically equivalent lexical items. Both groups showed an important formal similarity between their semantic networks. Mainly, a categorical-semantic analysis showed a bias of the hearers to taxonomic and introspective semantic relationships. In contrast, the deaf showed a bias toward situational semantic relationships and entities. These findings suggest differences in the concrete / abstract thinking between both populations when organizing their mental lexicon.

Semantic networks of space and time between deaf signers and Spanish listeners

Prediction is pervasive during sentence comprehension among native speakers of a language. But whether non-native speakers predict to the same extent as native speakers remains an open question. To examine the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability in native and non-native speakers, we con- ducted a self-paced reading and an acceptability judgement task. The results suggest that the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability are unequivocally robust among native speakers during sentence comprehension. However, the effects of syntactic predictability seem to be more robust for native speakers than for non-native speakers who are largely sensitive to semantic predictability.

Effects of syntactic and semantic predictability on sentence comprehension: A comparison between native and non-native speakers

How does the acquisition of semantically complex expressions track the acquisition of their constituent meanings? We investigate this question using the English quantifiers both and either. These quantifiers, while morphologically simplex, are semantically complex, comprising of two pieces: (i) universal/existential quantification and (ii) a size restriction on the quantificational domain to 2. Across two experiments, we compared the acquisition of these quantifiers with expressions mapping conceptual pieces that contribute to their make-up (two, all, any). Our results suggest that having all of the parts is not enough to put together the whole, a finding that could have implications for quantifier learning more broadly.

More than the sum of its parts: Acquiring semantically complex quantifiers

Singular they has become increasingly common as a personal pronoun of reference for non-binary individuals and in use with generic referents. While previous accounts of the licensing conditions of they are primarily syntactic, pragmatics may also play a role. By Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991), speakers who use they rather than a more specific gender marked pronoun are potentially signaling that they do not know the antecedent’s gender or that it is not relevant to their current goals. This would predict that socially close referents would be less felicitous antecedents for they. In this study, participants made judgments for nine types of antecedents. Gender marking, specificity, and social distance had reliable effects on acceptability. In addition, cluster analyses indicated that participants naturally fell into three groups, which align with those predicted by Konnelly and Cowper (2020). Individuals who were younger, more open to non-binary gender, and had more experience with non-binary individuals accepted they in more situations.

They is Changing: Pragmatic and Grammatical Factors that License Singular they

This study investigated whether positive or negative media exposure to non-local accents influences children’s language attitudes of those accents. Following exposure to heroic or villainous cartoon characters with either a regional (British; Experiment 1, N=89) or non-native (Experiment 2, N=84) accents, children were tested on a friend preference task, during which they selected—given a choice between a locally-accented child and a British-accented (Experiment 1) or Korean-accented (Experiment 2) child—which one they wanted to be friends with. Consistent with previous literature, children selected native-accented speakers at above chance rates, both when paired with British- (M=55%, β=0.25, p=0.03) and Korean-accented children (M=86%, β=2.63, p<.001). There was no evidence that exposure to heroic vs. villainous characters influenced children’s preferences for native-accented children in either experiment. Follow-up work is investigating whether protracted exposure to evil/heroic characters with non-local accents influences children’s evaluations to non-local varieties across a wider range of tasks.

The influence of media exposure on children’s evaluations of non-local accents

In English, Subject Relative Clauses are processed more quickly than Object Relative Clauses, but open questions remain about where in the clause slowdown occurs. The surprisal theory of incremental processing, under which processing difficulty corresponds to probabilistic expectations about upcoming material, predicts that slowdown should occur immediately on material that disambiguates the subject from object relative clause. However, evidence from eye tracking and self-paced reading studies suggests that slowdown occurs downstream of RC-disambiguating material, on the relative clause verb. These methods, however, suffer from well-known spillover effects which makes their results difficult to interpret. To address these issues, we introduce and deploy a novel variant of the Maze task for reading times (Forster, Guerrera, & Elliot, 2009), called the Interpolated Maze in two English web-based experiments. In Experiment 1, we find that the locus of reading-time differences between SRCs and ORCs falls on immediate disambiguating definite determiner. Experiment 2 provides a control, showing that ORCs are read more slowly than lexically-matching, non-anomalous material. These results provide new evidence for the locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses and support the surprisal theory of incremental processing.

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Associative learning of new word forms in a first language and gustatory stimuli

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Meaning in brains and machines: Internal activation update in large-scale language model partially reflects the N400 brain potential