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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.

CogSci 2023

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

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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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<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
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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.

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.

How communicative efficiency and social biases shape language in autistic and allistic learners

Patterns of language use change over time and may reflect and/or impact lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan.
In the current study, we quantified differences in lexico-semantic organization of different age groups and tested how they may be related to diachronic language change (measured using usage patterns in corpora from different decades).
Using diachronic word embeddings, we sampled words that have changed in meaning and words that have maintained the same meaning/usage patterns and tested how relatedness judgments differ when paired with word "neighbors'' from earlier vs. recent decades, for both younger and older adults.
Our findings suggest that individuals continuously update their lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan, and that the age-related differences may be due in part to the idiosyncratic language experience of older adults.
These results demonstrate the potential importance of considering language change when investigating lexico-semantic representations and aging.

Diachronic Language Change and Its Influence on Lexico-semantic Representations Across the Lifespan

As humans, we make sense of the world by organizing our daily experiences in terms of structured events. Events involve multiple participants, referred to as thematic roles. Here, we explore how thematic roles map onto language by investigating how speakers of two typologically different languages (English, Turkish) describe events that involve more peripheral event participants (Recipients, Instruments), whose conceptual status is highly debated. We manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that either ‘require’ or ‘allow’ Recipients and Instruments.
Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not affect mention of recipients and instruments in any language. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that mention of participant roles in language is affected by factors beyond the cognitive salience of the roles.

A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production

There is strong evidence about the preactivation of semantic information but controversial results about phonological preactivation. This research explored the individual differences in phono-semantic preactivation using the visual world paradigm. Participants looked at four competitors (semantic, phonological, and two unrelated) while hearing highly constraining sentences. Moreover, they were evaluated in verbal and nonverbal speed processing and working memory. Our results showed a strong semantic prediction but an inhibition of the phonological effect. These results were related to verbal and nonverbal working memory but not processing speed. The results were discussed in terms of lexical selection and inhibitory top-down influences.

Phono-semantic prediction during language comprehension: Effects of working memory

Recording the neural activity of multiple and large neural populations in the brain is becoming widely available with modern recording techniques. It still remains a challenge, however, to understand how distinct and anatomically different neural populations interact with each other to control behaviour. We propose a new method to discover causal interactions between neural populations based on recurrent switching dynamical systems. We introduce an extended dynamics model that incorporates the current time-step when calculating the latent state variables. We also introduce an acyclicity constrain in learning the parameters of the model. These mechanisms enable rich causal interactions between neuronal populations to be identified from the learned model. Our model outperforms previous work on discovering interactions between neural populations in simulated datasets, without sacrificing the prediction performance of firing rates. We also apply our method on real neural recordings from two macaque monkey brains performing a behavioral task, and show that the proposed method is able to detect causal interactions between brain regions related to the different time windows of the task.

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