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This study investigated how observing pitch gestures conveying lexical tones and representational gestures conveying word meanings when learning L2 Mandarin words differing in lexical tone affects their subsequent semantic and phonological processing in L1 English speakers using the N400 event-related potential (ERP). Larger N400s for English target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in meaning were observed for words learned with pitch and representational gesture, but not no gesture. Additionally, larger N400s for Mandarin target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in lexical tone were observed for words learned with pitch gesture, but not representational or no gesture. These findings provide the first ERP evidence that observing gestures conveying phonological and semantic information during L2 word learning enhances subsequent phonological and semantic processing of learned L2 words.

CogSci 2023

Observing Gestures During L2 Word Learning Facilitates Implicit Differentiation Between Unfamiliar Speech Sounds and Word Meanings

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

One aspect of context on cognition and memory that has been understudied is the influence of temporal context. The temporal contexts used in this study were different times of the year. More specifically, given that we were dealing with a largely Roman Catholic population, we operationalized temporal context in terms of two religious seasons, Lent and Ordinary Time. For this study, we assessed experience of, and memory for, representational and abstract art as a function of whether there was temporal congruity or incongruity. Temporal context did influence memory for perceptual details but not the experience of art during viewing, or gist and autobiographical memory. Thus, temporal context can influence cognition, but the scope of this influence is limited.

Temporal Context and the Experience and Memory of Art

Very few studies have focused on the stimulus materials for social situations to understand if contextual cues have impacts on the gaze pattern of children with ASD to investigate the emotion recognition performance. This study investigated the performance across 2 age groups (preschool, school age) between ASD and typically developing (TD) children by using eye-tracking techniques and recording recognition accuracy for different area of interests (AOI). The performance of ASD (n=91) and TD (n=155) participants were observed while asked to identify emotions in a context, including happy, sad, anger, fear, and surprise. The results showed no significant relationship between age and correct rate; but ASD groups actually spent more time on faces to recognize emotions compared to TD groups. The findings highlighted the greater effects of social experience on TD groups, leading to correctly identify emotions despite less gazing time at faces.

Emotion Recognition and Gaze Pattern of Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Children

Response inhibition refers to the ability to suppress a prepotent response. Studies investigating the role of emotional information in response inhibition have yielded inconsistent results; some studies have shown that positive emotion, compared to negative, facilitates inhibitory control, while other studies have shown opposite effects. We resolve this debate by hypothesizing that the scope of attention with which emotional information is processed can explain these mixed results. We combined a stop signal task with a global-local Navon task. Participants were required to detect a target presented at either a global or local perceptual level (letters H, S, and T). Occasionally, they encountered a stop signal face with irrelevant angry, happy, or neutral expressions. We found that irrelevant happy facial expression impaired inhibitory control compared to angry facial expression under global processing; however, this effect got reversed under local processing, i.e., happy faces facilitated inhibitory control compared to angry faces.

Irrelevant happy faces facilitate and interfere with inhibitory control under a narrow and a broad scope of attention, respectively.

Languages seem to be designed for efficient communication. For example, shorter forms are used for more predictable meanings, a tendency argued to stem from speakers’ efficient language use. However, no study to date has systematically tested whether communicative efficiency shapes children’s language use. Investigating whether such a pressure is already present in children will shed light on the development of children’s’ communicative behaviour and the respective roles of adults and children in shaping language structure. Here, we investigate the development of communicative efficiency using a novel experimental paradigm with children ages 4-10. Results show that communicative efficiency is attested already in young children and becomes more adult-like with age: as children grow, they are more likely to shorten messages (minimize effort) when a short message is sufficient for accurate communication. We discuss the implications of our results for cognitive development and for theories of language evolution and change.

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

This study sought to determine if a child’s inventory of denominal verbs (e.g., swing as a verb) at 42 and 54 months are predicted by their inventory of related nouns (e.g., swing as a noun) at 30 months and whether these relationships are different for late talking and typically developing children. Keywords consisting of denominal verbs and related nouns were extracted from 42 late talking and 44 typically developing children at 30, 42, and 54 months. Preliminary results revealed that related noun inventories at 30 months predict denominal verb inventories at 42 months. However, related noun inventories at 30 months do not predict denominal verb inventories at 54 months. These results suggest that differences in noun inventories are linked to denominal verb inventories regardless of language status, but only in an early window of development.

Noun Today, Verb Tomorrow: Differences in the Expressive Noun Inventories of Late Talking and Typically Developing 30-Month-Olds Predicts Expressive Denominal Verb Inventories

Many studies show that language comprehenders track multiple object state-changes during event comprehension. In this research, we investigate if comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects. In Experiments 1 to 3, participants were asked to verify whether the object depicted in a picture was mentioned in the previously read sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or not (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, participants were faster to verify that an object was mentioned in the sentence if its pictured state matched the state implied by the sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were slower to verify pictured objects (e.g., cake) after reading a sentence that implied multiple states for a semantically similar (e.g., egg) rather than dissimilar (e.g., thermometer) object. Thus, comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects.

Representation of object state-changes of semantically similar objects

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that human sentence comprehension is predictive. The current study investigates if this is also the case in the realm of argument structure. Previous studies using the cross-modal priming (CMP) paradigm show that whether and when the subject is reactivated after the encounter with the verb depends on the type of the verb (unaccusative vs. unergative). We hypothesized that this is because the human parser predicts the verb type in advance. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a CMP experiment and manipulated the parser’s prediction by changing the bias on the verb type in the experimental stimuli. We found that the reactivation pattern interacts with the bias, as expected by our hypothesis.

Unaccusativity, expectation, and reactivation of the subject in sentence comprehension

This paper delves into the possible correlations between cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s Disease and differences in the ways spatial relations are decoded by groups of individuals with and without AD. We tested participants’ judgments of spatial scenes coded according to intrinsic, relative or undissociated Frames of Reference, ground rotation and use of a locative construction. We found significant differences in the costs of processing spatial information which were considerably higher in elderly and AD groups. On the other hand, judgment ratings reveal that those groups tend to maintain the same Frame of Reference applied by health young individuals to resolve the spatial ambiguity. Furthermore, a general preference for non-relative Frames of Reference was found among participants, all native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.

Framing Space: Alzheimer’s Disease and Object Location in Brazilian Portuguese

The relationship between the language a speaker conveys and the meaning a listener recovers is often probabilistic and sensitive to context. Numerous strategies attempt to estimate such a mapping, often leveraging recursive Bayesian models of communication. In parallel, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied to semantic parsing applications, tasked with inferring logical representations from NL. While existing LLM explorations have been largely restricted to literal language use, in this work, we evaluate the capacity of LLMs to make inferences over pragmatic utterances. Specifically, we explore the case of threshold estimation on gradable adjectives, e.g., “strong”, contextually conditioned on a strength prior, then extending to composition with qualification, negation, polarity inversion, and class comparison. We find that LLMs can derive context-grounded, human-like inferences over interpretations for complex utterances such as “very strong for a beginner”, but struggle with composing such amortized inferences with negation or polarity inversion.

LLMs are pretty strong pragmatic reasoners: Investigating amortized inferences about gradable adjectives in large language models

Recent research in experimental language evolution has considered how a pressure for efficient communication---i.e., the trade-off between production effort and communicative accuracy---impacts language structure. For instance, there is evidence that the use (or non-use) of case marking is influenced by this trade-off: both in natural languages, and in experimental studies of artificial language learning, case marking of grammatical arguments is more likely to be used in languages with flexible word order, and less likely in languages with fixed word order as a cue to argument structure. However, experimental evidence also suggests that social biases can influence efficiency. Language learners are themselves less efficient when there is a social bias in favour of a group whose productions are inefficient---e.g., who use case redundantly in a fixed word order language. Like the vast majority of studies in experimental psychology, studies on communicative efficiency and other cognitive factors that might shape language have been conducted on neurotypical populations. Here, we examine how the influence of social biases on efficient communication is impacted by autistic traits. We find that autistic people's use of case in the absence of a social bias is comparative to their neurotypical peers. However, we also find evidence that autistic people adhere more to social biases. In particular, they increase production effort in order to behave more like the group they are biased towards. We argue that some autistic people may be more likely to adhere to a social bias as a result of learnt social behaviours. More generally, these results underscore the importance of studying more diverse populations in language evolution research.

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Observing Gestures During L2 Word Learning Facilitates Implicit Differentiation Between Unfamiliar Speech Sounds and Word Meanings

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Temporal Context and the Experience and Memory of Art