United States

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.

CogSci 2021

Processing differences among irregular inflection classes

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
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 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
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 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
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 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
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31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

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Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

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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. 

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A crucial step in children's language development is the mastery of how to use language in context. This involves the ability to recognize and use major categories of speech acts (e.g., learning that a "question" is different from a "request"). The current work provides a quantitative account of speech acts' emergence in the wild. Using a longitudinal corpus of child-caregiver conversations annotated for speech acts (Snow et al.,1996), we introduced two complementary measures of learning based on both children's production and comprehension. We also tested two predictors of learning based on input frequency and the speech acts' quality of linguistic cues. We found that children's developmental trajectory differed largely between production and comprehension. In addition, development in both of these dimensions was not explained with the same predictors (e.g., frequency in child-directed speech was predictive of production, but not of comprehension). The broader impact of this work is to provide a computational framework for the study of communicative development where both measures and predictors of children's pragmatic development can be tested and compared.

Modeling speech act development in early childhood: the role of frequency and linguistic cues

Similarities of either artificial or natural groups are extractable by our visual system in terms of ensemble perception.
On the other hand cognitive linguistics postulates that changing mental image schema for describing a scene from global to local and vice versa is obvious in our daily conversations. 
Here we hypothesized that global or local priming of participants would modulate their threshold in mean discrimination task (MDT).
Thereby, 10 right-handed , 14 years old participants went through an ABBA within-subject counterbalance design to compare 4 pairs of collective and singular nouns priming effect by successive ensemble size perception task(MDT) including a display of random circles sizes and then a mean discrimination task to decide which one of the test circles match the previous display mean circle size. 
Our preliminary results demonstrate Persian collective nouns in comparison to singular nouns could decrease threshold to distinguish mean circle sizes in last display.

Persian collective nouns enhance ensemble size perception

The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents in context is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We present two analyses of the current database (N=1,320): (1) capturing age-related changes in infants' word recognition while generalizing across item-level variability and (2) assessing how a central methodological decision -- selecting the time window of analysis -- impacts the reliability of measurement. Future efforts will expand the scope of the current database to advance our understanding of participant-level and item-level variation in children's vocabulary development.

Peekbank: Exploring children's word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data

Top-down predictive processes and bottom-up auditory processes interact in speech comprehension. In background noise, the acoustic signal is degraded. This study investigated the interaction of these processes in a word recognition paradigm using high and low predictability sentences in two types of background noise and using phonetically controlled contrasts. Previous studies have reported false hearing, but have not provided insight into what phonetic features are most prone to false hearing. We here systematically explore this issue and find that plosives lead to increased false hearing compared to vowels. Furthermore, this study on German for the first time replicates the overall false hearing effect in young adults for a language other than English.

Recognition of Minimal Pairs in (un)predictive Sentence Contexts in two Types of Noise

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

Knowledge built culturally across generations rests on language, but the power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning are not well understood. We take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language. We developed a suite of complex, high-stakes video games, which we deployed in an iterated learning paradigm. Game participants were limited to only two attempts (lives) per game, after which they wrote a message to a future participant who read the message before playing. Knowledge accumulated gradually across generations, with later generations advancing further in the games while performing more efficient actions, in a manner strikingly similar trajectory to the learning trajectories of isolated, immortal individuals. These results suggest that language is sufficient to accumulate diverse repertoires of knowledge acquired in these tasks. The video game paradigm is thus a rich test-bed for theories of cultural transmission and learning from language.

Growing knowledge culturally across generations to solve novel, complex task

We asked whether categories expressed through lists of salient exemplars (e.g., car, truck, boat, etc.) convey the same meaning as categories expressed through conventional superordinate nouns (e.g., vehicles). We asked English speakers to list category members, with one group given superordinate labels like vehicles and the other group given only a list of salient exemplars. We found that the responses of the group given labels were more related, more typical, and less diverse than the responses of the group given exemplars. This result suggests that when people do not see a superordinate label, the categories that they infer are less well aligned across participants. In addition, categories inferred based on exemplars may be broader in general than categories given by superordinate labels.

Lions, tigers and bears: Conveying a superordinate category without a superordinate label

Asking and answering questions is a staple of human communication. To answer a question effectively, a hearer must interpret the speaker's intention given the specific question asked. ‘Wh’-questions like ‘Where can I get coffee?’ are underspecified for (non-)exhaustivity, i.e., how many answers must be provided to resolve the speaker's goal. Intuitions from the semantics literature report that questions are generally exhaustive, and non-exhaustive only in the context of specific linguistic factors (e.g., the modal ‘can’, certain ‘wh’-words). To test these assumptions, we collected question paraphrase ratings for naturally occurring root questions in variable linguistic contexts. In contrast to previous claims, we find that questions are not biased for exhaustivity. However, other prior observations are supported by the data. We argue that a full account of the observed distribution of meanings must integrate discourse factors like the hearer's estimate of the speaker's goal, alongside (or subsuming the effect of) linguistic cues.

Who thinks wh-questions are exhaustive?

How does abstract linguistic negation develop in early child language? Previous research has suggested that abstract negation develops in stages and from more concrete communicative functions such as rejection, prohibition, or non-existence.
The evidence for the emergence of these functions in stages is mixed, however, leaving the possibility that negation is an abstract concept from the beginning that can serve multiple specific functions depending on early communicative environment. Leveraging automatic annotations of large-scale child speech corpora in English, we examine the production trajectories of seven negative constructions that tend to convey communicative functions previously discussed in the literature. The results demonstrate the emergence and gradual increase of these constructions in child speech within the age range of 18-36 months. Production mostly remains stable, regular, and close to parents’ levels after this age range. These findings are consistent with two hypotheses: first, that negation starts as an abstract concept that can serve multiple functions from the beginning; and second, that negation develops in stages from specific communicative functions but this development is early and quick, leaving our corpus methods incapable of detecting them from the available corpus data.

Processing differences among irregular inflection classes

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