Netherlands

German has two demonstrative series, the der (die, das) series and the dieser (diese, dieses) series. Both have been claimed to be topic shifters, taking up a non-topical antecedent and promoting it to topichood. However, der can form topical referential chains, while dieser cannot. We operationalize discourse topichood via questions and provide evidence from a corpus study and an acceptability study that while dieser is indeed sensitive to topichood and avoids topical antecedents, der is compatible with topical antecedents. We hypothesize that only dieser is a discourse topic shifter, while der marks a sentence topic.

**Authors:**

Timo Buchholz: Universität zu Köln; Klaus von Heusinger: University of Cologne

CogSci 2024

German demonstratives and topic questions

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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.

While effects of animacy and attention have been studied quite extensively in adult speakers, less is known about their role in child language production. In the present study we fill this gap by testing German-speaking preschool children in two language production tasks using eye-tracking. We find that animacy does neither affect the production of transitive sentences nor the production of conjoined noun phrases. By contrast, we find significant effects of attentional orienting. Children were more likely to first fixate an entity when it had been preceded by a visual cue and was hence in their focus of attention. While this held true across tasks, attentional orienting only affected children’s production of conjoined noun phrases but not the production of transitive sentences. Effects of attentional orienting therefore seem conditioned by language production affordances. In sum, our findings provide new evidence that animacy and attention play different roles in children’s language production.

**Authors:**

Sarah Dolscheid: University of Cologne; Martina Penke: University of Cologne

Animacy and attention play different roles in children’s language production

At birth, the human brain is tuned to spoken language in general and to some extent also to native language in particular. In behavioral studies, infants also prefer to listen to infant-directed speech (IDS) to adults-directed speech (ADS), apparently most robustly in their native language. Recent studies demonstrated that this preference has correlates at the neural level as well. We test whether newborns show differential neural tracking of native over foreign, rhythmically different, language.

We assess neural tracking of native and non-native speech in Czech-exposed newborns. Newborns' were played a children's story in two rhythmically different languages, Czech (lacking acoustic cues to word-level stress) and Russian (acoustically salient word-level stress), in IDS or ADS, while their EEG was recorded.

We predicted stronger neural tracking of the native Czech, evident in larger inter-trial phase coherence (ITC), and total power. Preliminary data (n = 27 out of planned 60) suggest this language-specific effect is most prominent in the theta band corresponding to the syllable rate. We will further test whether this native-language effect would be more prominent in ADS or IDS. Data collection is underway and the results will be presented & discussed at the conference.

**Authors:**

Martina Dvořáková: Charles University; Katerina Chladkova: Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences; Josef Urbanec: Faculty od Medicine in Hradec Kralove, Charles University; Jan Kremláček: Faculty od Medicine in Hradec Kralove, Charles University

Newborns' neural tracking of infant-directed and adult-directed speech in native and foreign language

Recently the principles of efficient communication have provided useful characterizations of semantic typology: the diversity of attested languages can be described by competing pressures for simplicity and informativeness. While this approach has achieved success in several semantic domains, the formalizations used to define complexity across domains vary. In this note, we list the conditions under which the two main approaches of defining complexity: channel rate and description length, unify and, thus, conclusions about near-optimal communicative efficiency generalize across formalizations. We illustrate this equivalence using simulations of communicative efficiency for Boolean concepts. We round out this note discussing the (un)importance of description languages and the limits on generalizing this equivalence for other behavioral targets for explanation.

**Authors:**

Francis Mollica: University of Melbourne

A note on complexity in efficient communication analyses of semantic typology

Research suggests that the meanings of iconic signs are not easily accessible to sign-naive people; however, some signs' meanings are more easily guessed than others'. What causes some signs to be more easily guessable (more transparent) than others is not well-understood. In our previous research, we showed that signs whose form is based on more cross-linguistically common underlying motivations are more transparent than signs based on less common underlying motivations (Authors, Year). In the current study, we ask whether signs that are rated as more iconic are more interpretable. We asked 104 English speakers with no knowledge of sign languages to rate signs from our previous study for how iconic they are. We then reanalyzed the data from our previous study in light of the obtained iconicity ratings. We found that when people choose between a relevant sign and an irrelevant sign (e.g., when participants pick a sign that is supposed to mean 'cat' from two signs, one of which indeed means 'cat' but the other does not), iconicity does not matter: participants tend to choose the sign with the relevant meaning, regardless of whether it is highly iconic or not. However, when participants are presented with two signs with the same meaning (e.g., signs for 'cat' from two different sign languages), not only do they choose the sign that is based on a more common cross-linguistic motivation (as we reported in [Authors, Year]), but iconicity does appear to influence interpretability. Specifically, participants were more likely to pick the more cross-linguistically common sign if the difference in iconicity ratings between the two signs was bigger. Taken together, the data show that participants are sensitive to at least three factors: the underlying motivation of the sign (choosing the sign with a relevant meaning over one with an irrelevant meaning), the cross-linguistic frequency of the sign (choosing the relevant sign based on more cross-linguistically common underlying motivation over the relevant sign based on a less common one), and the iconicity of the sign (choosing the more cross-linguistically common sign more the higher the difference in iconicity ratings is). These results shed additional light on the ongoing debate on the connection between iconicity and transparency: Iconicity by itself does not make a sign transparent, but it can enhance transparency under certain conditions.

**Authors:**

Oksana Tkachman: University of British Columbia; Emily Sadlier-Brown: The University of British Columbia; Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo: University of British Columbia ; Carla Hudson Kam: University of British Columbia

Transparency in Sign Forms: When and How Does Iconicity Matter?

This study examines three types of vocal iconicity—sound effects, onomatopoeia, and iconic prosody—in Chinese child-directed speech (CDS), adult-directed speech (ADS), and child production. We analyzed a corpus of semi-spontaneous ADS and CDS from forty Chinese mother-child dyads, where the children were 18 and 24 months old. Our findings revealed that (1)mothers used significantly more sound effects and iconic prosody, but not onomatopoeias, in CDS compared to ADS. Interestingly, mothers’ iconic prosody was also acoustically more congruent with lexical meanings; (2)The frequency of these types of iconicity in input followed this order: iconic prosody>sound effects> onomatopoeias; and (3)Chinese children aged 18 or 24 months seldom produced onomatopoeia or iconic prosody. These findings suggest that iconicity is more prevalent and prosodically marked in CDS than in ADS, which may help children’s word-to-world mapping. Also, iconic prosody is an advanced prosodic skill that is not typically developed by two-year-old children.

**Authors:**

Mengru Han: East China Normal University; Yiqi Nie: East China Normal University; Yan Gu: University of Essex

Bridging Word and World: Vocal Iconicity in Chinese Child-Directed Speech and Child Production

Disagreements are speech acts used by interlocutors to challenge previous assertions. When disagreements express subjective views, they can often be perceived as faultless. It is however unclear whether accepting a disagreement as faultless causes comprehenders to update their own semantic representations of the predicate targeted by the disagreement. Using the vague quantifiers many and few as a case study, we find in two adaptation studies that participants shifted their meaning representations of the quantifiers after being exposed to disagreements that were perceived to be faultless. The adaptation strengthened the participants' baseline preferences, suggesting that even when a disagreement is judged to be faultless, there exists a perceived asymmetry in the plausibility of the two viewpoints under discussion.

**Authors:**

Emily Pecsok: Cornell University; Helena Aparicio: Cornell University

How can they both be right?: Faultless disagreement and semantic adaptation

Connectives like `because’ are referred to as `processing instructions’ since they facilitate processing of linguistic material directly following the connective. In an expectation-driven account of discourse processing, this can be attributed to predictions that readers make about the upcoming discourse relation, but also to predictions about upcoming discourse content. By modeling these two accounts, termed the relation prediction account and the content prediction account respectively, we show that they make different predictions about when the presence of a connective is most beneficial. In a self-paced reading study, we replicate the facilitative effect of the connective on processing, but do not find any evidence that this effect can be explained by a strong or weak version of either of the two accounts. This suggests that the role of the connective goes above and beyond informing the reader about the upcoming relation and content and possibly triggers a different processing strategy.

**Authors:**

Marian Marchal: Saarland University; Merel Cleo Johanna Scholman: Utrecht University; Ted Sanders: Utrecht University; Vera Demberg: Saarland University

What processing instructions do connectives provide? Modeling the facilitative effect of the connective

Studies of event individuation often consider people's representations of activities involving agents performing complex tasks. Concomitantly, theories of event individuation emphasize predictions about agents' intentions. While the ability to make such predictions must relate to some basis in lower-level perceptual features, little attention has yet been paid to identifying those features. We probe a fundamental distinction between `event' and `process' representation, relying on and extending studies that reveal object and event representation to be deeply analogous in our cognitive economy. We provide evidence that `temporal shape', as suggested by formal analysis in natural language semantics, is a sufficient low-level perceptual criterion for the individuation of events.

**Authors:**

Douglas Wadle: University of Kansas; Devansh Bansal: University of Southern California; Alexis C Wellwood: University of Southern California

Temporal Shaping and the Event/Process Distinction

Shy children are often delayed in their communicative productive behavior when reacting to novel situations. In this study, we wanted to know what kind of situational changes cause a delay and investigated 14 preschool children’s individual processing of situational demands and small changes to it. Whereas children’s shyness was measured by what the caregivers reported, children’s processing of situational demands was measured by their nonverbal turn-taking during two sessions with a social robot. We focused on how children respond to their partner when the situation is altered in comparison to a familiar one. Our results show that when the changes were introduced not only in the setting (spatial arrangement of the objects) but also in the robot’s request (i.e., the task), shy children were delayed compared to their less shy peers. Our results shed more light onto the question of how children perceive a situation and situational changes.

**Authors:**

Valeriia Tykhonenko: Paderborn University; Nils F Tolksdorf: Paderborn University; Katharina Rohlfing: Paderborn University

How turn-taking can inform about becoming familiar with a task and changes to it: shy and nonshy four-year-old children

Linguistic strategies humans use for communication are designed to meet the informational needs of their addressees. Speakers adapt not only speech but also increase the rate of iconic gestures to enhance the message clarity for children. Although sign languages allow signers to take advantage of iconicity to a far greater extent than what is possible in spoken languages, little is known about whether signers use iconicity as a strategy in child-directed communication. In the present study, we used automatic video pose estimation to analyze descriptions aimed at a child (12yo) vs. an adult produced by 7 deaf adult signers of Italian Sign Language. Overall, signers used iconic constructions more than lexical signs and with comparable frequency in descriptions for both age groups. However, iconic constructions were longer in duration for children. Taken together, the present study presents the first evidence that unlike speakers signers do not modulate quantitative but only qualitative aspects of iconicity for children.

**Authors:**

Anita Slonimska: Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics; Alessio di Renzo: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies; Mounika Kanakanti: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Emanuela Campisi: University of Catania; Asli Ozyurek: Donders Institute 

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