Netherlands

Word senses rise and fall due to a variety of causes. Previous research has explored how words grow novel senses, but the opposite problem of word sense decline is much less studied. Inspired by recent work on word decline, we investigate the cognitive factors that might explain the historical decline of word senses. We formalize a set of eight psycholinguistic predictors and assess their roles in discriminating declining senses from stable ones over the past two centuries in English. We find that semantic density, change in usage frequency in the semantic neighbourhood, and contextual diversity all predict word sense decline. Our study elucidates the cognitive underpinnings of word sense decline as the lexicon evolves.

**Authors:**

Aniket Kali: University of Toronto; Yang Xu: University of Toronto; Suzanne Stevenson: University of Toronto

CogSci 2024

Cognitive Factors in Word Sense Decline

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
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This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

technical paper

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
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Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


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#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
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This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

We conduct a large-scale study of online community variation in language. We show that factors of efficient communication, which have been shown to drive crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems, also play a role in within-language variation across 1926 English-language Reddit communities. We study variation in stancetaking behaviour, a domain where efficient communication may be influenced by social motivations for language use. We find that communities indeed have efficient stancetaking systems, particularly with respect to their own communicative needs. However, contrasting with crosslinguistic work, we find that communities are often not optimized for their needs. Moreover, we find that community-level social factors correlate with how optimized they are. These results highlight the importance of accounting for social pressures for language use when studying how efficient communication drives variation.

**Authors:**

Jai Aggarwal: University of Toronto; Julia Watson: University of Toronto; Prabuddha Senapati: University Of Toronto; Suzanne Stevenson: University of Toronto

The (in)efficiency of within-language variation in online communities

This study explores human capabilities in distinguishing and recognizing entities that change over time from those that do not. We specifically investigate the linguistic distinction between "individual-level predicates" (ILPs) and "stage-level predicates" (SLPs). Our empirical approach focuses on how humans visually distinguish these two types. We performed a corpus analysis, in which a set of image captions were randomly extracted and annotated by experts with either SLP or ILP labels. The findings indicated a predominance of SLPs over ILPs in the image captions. We then performed automatic annotation on a large dataset of image captions and conducted a machine-learning experiment on image classification based on ILSs and SLPs. Our results demonstrated that SLPs were identified with high accuracy, while ILPs were identified with about chance level, substantially lower than human capabilities. Given the analyses, we discuss what features of the image contribute to distinguishing between ILPs and SLPs.

**Authors:**

Yuri Sato: Ochanomizu University; Ayaka Suzuki: Chiba University; Koji Mineshima: Keio University

Capturing stage-level and individual-level information from photographs: Human-AI comparison

We conducted a case study on how unreliable and/or unrepresentative stimuli in psycholinguistics research may impact the generalizability of experimental findings. Using the domain of lexical ambiguity as a foil, we analyzed 2033 unique words (6481 tokens) from 214 studies. Specifically, we examined how often studies agreed on the ambiguity types assigned to a word (i.e., homonymy, polysemy, and monosemy), and how well the words represented the populations underlying each ambiguity type. We observed far from perfect agreement in terms of how words are assigned to ambiguity types.  We also observed that coverage of the populations is relatively poor and biased, leading to the use of a narrower set of words and associated properties. This raises concerns about the degree to which prior theoretical claims have strong empirical support, and offers targeted directions to improve research practices that are relevant to a broad set of domains.

**Authors:**

Jiangtian Li: University of Toronto Scarborough; Blair C. Armstrong: University of Toronto

Issues of Generalization from Unreliable or Unrepresentative Psycholinguistic Stimuli: A Case Study on Lexical Ambiguity

Recent research indicates that paired comparisons can accelerate perceptual learning of challenging dermatological lesion categories. Here we investigated whether the role of object categories as targets or distractors differentially influences learning outcomes. The frequency with which a given category occupied the target position was manipulated across three learning conditions: Always-Never, where half of 10 categories were always shown as target and the other half never shown as target; Often-Rarely, where half of categories appeared 75% as targets and 25% as distractors, with reversed presentation frequency for the other half; and Equal Split learning, in which all categories appeared as targets or distractors equally often. After learning, transfer results indicated that all conditions yielded equivalent overall learning, but categories prioritized more often as targets exhibited greater learning gains. These findings implicate differential processing of images in comparisons, even when no information regarding target vs. distractor was given prior to feedback.

**Authors:**

Victoria L Jacoby: University of California, Los Angeles; Christine M. Massey: University of California, Los Angeles; Philip J Kellman: University of California, Los Angeles

Target vs. Distractor: Does the Role of a Category In Comparisons Influence Learning? Evidence from Skin Cancer Classification

This paper discusses an experiment conducted with two groups of participants, composed of musicians and non-musicians, in order to investigate the impact that the speed of a sound sequence and the interval size which selected sounds are played on the grouping of sounds into perceptual streams. Significant differences were observed between musicians and non-musicians with respect to the threshold sequence speed at which the sequence was split into two streams. In modern psychoacoustic studies, the qualifying criteria for listeners usually include otologically normal hearing (verified by audiometric test) and age. The differences in the results for the two groups suggest that the musical background of the participating listeners may be a vital factor. The criterion of musical education should be taken into account during experiments so that the results obtained are reliable, uniform and free from interpretive errors.

**Authors:**

Adam Rosiński: University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn

Influence of Music Education and Interval Size on Grouping of the AB-AB Sequence Sounds

This study investigates the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing in olfaction. It focuses on how odor recognition is impacted after individuals sniffed and then described odors. Three key findings emerged. First, participants who refrained from describing a previously encountered target odor (control group) showed significantly superior performance in recognizing the target odor compared to those who had described it (verbal group). Second, the verbal overshadowing effect tended to diminish or completely disappear when participants were required to respond rapidly. Third, providing participants with instructions highlighting potential conflicts between olfactory and verbal representations did not alleviate the influence of the verbal overshadowing effect.  To conclude, describing an odor elaborately can adversely affect odor memory, even when one is aware of this, but this is mitigated under speeded conditions.

**Authors:**

Yaxiong Cao: University of Auckland; Asifa Majid: University of Oxford; Norbert Vanek: University of Auckland

Verbal overshadowing in odor recognition

Aspectual coercion occurs when there is a semantic mismatch between constituents in terms of their lexical aspect. Despite the long psycholinguistic history of this phenomenon, we currently lack direct measures of how people interpret coerced sentences. We introduce a novel method combining aspectual comprehension with event cognition, allowing us to detect changes in how individuals construe events after reading sentences with varying aspectual information. This study involved two experiments where participants read sentences—either telic or atelic, with or without coercion—followed by a video clip related to the sentence. They assessed if the actor completed the task and identified any brief interruptions during the event, located at the midpoint or late points. The focus was on whether coerced sentences altered participants' event construals, impacting their responses. Results uncovered distinct cognitive responses to aspectual coercion and highlighted differences between coercion types. This method advances our understanding of how lexical aspect influences event representation, offering insights into the nuanced effects of aspectual coercion on cognitive processing and event perception.

**Authors:**

Ugurcan Vurgun: University of Pennsylvania; Yue Ji: Beijing Institute of Technology; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

Detecting Event Construal Shifts in Aspectual Coercion

Real-world cognition is affected by ever-present interactions with other agents. The mind dynamically adjusts according to observations about other agents, such as of their behavior, actions, and sentiment, as well as to inferences about their hidden states, such as their goals, intentions, and trustworthiness. This symposium highlights the processes that enable this flexible adjustment across multiple timescales of cognition.

DYNAMICS WITHIN THE MIND

Dynamics Between the Minds

Events are a fundamental part of human experience. Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing central aspects of how humans perceive, conceptualize, communicate about, and remember events. This symposium offers an interdisciplinary look at recent advances in the study of event cognition. The symposium brings together cognitive scientists from across continents, who are experts on the subject. The symposium contributors come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neuro-computational psychology, and linguistics. They combine a variety of innovative and integrative approaches and methodologies and study diverse populations across the lifespan and across languages. The overall goal of this symposium is to foster an interdisciplinary conversation on different aspects of event cognition.

**Authors:**

Sarah Hye-yeon Lee: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania; Jeffrey M. Zacks: Washington University in Saint Louis; Dare Baldwin: University of Oregon; Eva Wittenberg: Central European University

Advances in the Study of Event Cognition

Humans engage in a wide variety of search behaviors during their lifetime. These search behaviors may be external such as foraging for food in the wild, or searching for mates, or internal, such as searching for concepts in memory. Decades of work on search processes among humans has suggested that these two types of search behaviors share common characteristics and physiological mechanisms. Despite this progress, understanding the dynamics of internal search is an ongoing challenge in the field.

**Authors:**

Abhilasha Kumar: Bowdoin College; Cynthia S.Q. Siew: National University of Singapore; Peter M. Todd: Indiana University, Bloomington; Yoed Kenett: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

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