Netherlands

Semanticists have debated the extent to which modality and causation are related in natural language. This paper aims to promote a theory in which periphrastic causatives share core components of meaning with deontic modals, and potentially other kinds of modals. We report a sentence recall experiment that suggests that priming can be used to target the high-level meaning representations shared between two syntactically distinct linguistic expressions. Our results show that it&#39;s possible to prime the production of the deontic modal `had to&#39; (e.g., ``Giorgio had to go to the store&quot;), with causative `made&#39; (e.g., ``Giulia made Giorgio go to the store&#39;&#39;), suggesting that the two expressions share a component of their meaning. This paper shows that abstract semantic representation can be primed using the standard psycholinguistic method and contributes to the methodological and theoretical progress of understanding semantic processing and its effect on language production.

**Authors:**

Angelica Hill: University of Massachusetts Amherst; Shota Momma: University of Massachusetts Amherst

CogSci 2024

Priming Abstract Modal Representations in Modals with Causatives

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Semanticists have debated the extent to which modality and causation are related in natural language. This paper aims to promote a theory in which periphrastic causatives share core components of meaning with deontic modals, and potentially other kinds of modals. We report a sentence recall experiment that suggests that priming can be used to target the high-level meaning representations shared between two syntactically distinct linguistic expressions. Our results show that it's possible to prime the production of the deontic modal `had to' (e.g., ``Giorgio had to go to the store"), with causative `made' (e.g., ``Giulia made Giorgio go to the store''), suggesting that the two expressions share a component of their meaning. This paper shows that abstract semantic representation can be primed using the standard psycholinguistic method and contributes to the methodological and theoretical progress of understanding semantic processing and its effect on language production.

**Authors:**

Angelica Hill: University of Massachusetts Amherst; Shota Momma: University of Massachusetts Amherst

poster

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** 
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

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) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **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 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

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** 
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

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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.

Several studies found that word duration is predicted by its informativity (average past predictability) above and beyond predictability in the current context, suggesting retrieval of phonetically-specific tokens from memory. We show that a significant effect of informativity can emerge from noise in predictability estimates. We generate durations from a model in which 38% of log duration is predicted by log probability, as in our actual data, but the rest is normally-distributed noise. Estimated probability for each word in each context is then generated from a binomial distribution with success probability from the real sample and size matching context frequency. We compute informativity and fit the regression model we fit to the real data. Informativity is significant in 100% of simulations, even though probability is the only true predictor, although the effect of informativity is smaller in simulation (0.7 < b < 0.10) than in the actual corpus (b = 0.12).

**Authors:**

Vsevolod Kapatsinski: University of Oregon

Informativity effects can be probability effects in disguise

Numbers and pictures are the two most frequently used types of experimental stimuli in bilingual language control studies. However, the potential qualitative differences in the representation and processing of these stimuli could involve the recruitment of divergent cognitive mechanisms. This paper investigates the influence of stimulus type (numbers vs pictures) on language processing in bilingual comprehension, specifically examining whether semantic connections between numbers impact language switching. We tested Chinese-English-Spanish trilinguals in two cross-modal matching tasks (i.e., a picture-word matching task and a magnitude-number matching task) in the context of the n-2 language switching paradigm. Contrary to the n-2 repetition cost observed in previous studies employing the same paradigm, our findings reveal an n-2 repetition benefit. Crucially, the n-2 repetition effect was observed only with numbers. We discuss the findings in relation to the prevalent language control mechanisms and how lexical associations between numbers may give rise to the observed difference.

**Authors:**

Hong Liu: Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University ; Adel Chaouch-Orozco: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The Influence of Stimulus Type on Language Processing in Comprehension

Sentences with negated adjectives receive a stronger interpretation than given by their semantics, a phenomenon called negative strengthening. It has been reported that inherently positive adjectives display a higher degree of negative strengthening than inherently negative adjectives. We investigate two possible causes of this asymmetry: intrinsic adjectival polarity and face considerations. Results of an experiment where
face-related factors were manipulated suggest that both polarity and face contribute to the asymmetry. Extending a probabilistic RSA model of indirect speech, we formalize the listener’s reasoning about a speaker’s use of negated adjectives as a tradeoff between expecting a speaker to maximize both an utterance’s social and informational utility, while avoiding inherently costly adjectives.

**Authors:**

Sarang Jeong: Stanford University; Christopher Potts: Stanford University; Judith Degen: Stanford University

Is the asymmetry in negative strengthening the result of polarity or face considerations?

Linguistic arguments can be either explicitly realized (After she phoned him, …) or left implicit (After she phoned [∅], …). In production, the choice between these options is thought to depend on the contextual predictability of the implied referent. We investigated whether different contextual referents (single vs. multiple vs. underspecified) also affect the comprehension of implicit arguments, using the “maze” variant of self-paced reading. Our results suggest that, rather than predictability, other context-dependent pragmatic effects, such as the perceived genericness of actions, may influence how speakers comprehend implicitly encoded information.

**Authors:**

Tobias Ungerer: Concordia University; Roberto G. de Almeida: Concordia University

Context affects the comprehension of implicit arguments: Evidence from the maze task

Natural languages often exhibit agreement, where two words must be matched for certain features. It’s well known that people use knowledge about agreement to drive expectations during online processing. What is less well known is how the type of dependency mediates this expectation and thus the processing difficulty of a gender-mismatched word. To test this, we collect incremental processing data on three types of gender agreement mismatches in Russian: (i) past-tense verbs and subjects, (ii) attributive adjectives and nouns, (iii) predicate adjectives and nouns. We collect two types of incremental processing data: eye-tracking and Mouse-Tracking-for-Reading (MoTR), in which a participant reveals and reads text by moving their mouse, whose position is recorded. We find that while participants are surprised by ungrammatical conditions, this is mediated both by the type of agreement as well as the gender of the agreeing noun.

**Authors:**

Cui Ding: University of Zurich; Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox: ETH Zurich; Metehan Oguz: University of Southern California; Zuzanna Fuchs: University of Southern California

How does dependency type mediate gender agreement in Russian?

Phonological assimilation is cross-linguistically widespread, but languages differ in their type(s) of assimilation. We investigate optional assimilation in bilingual speakers to examine whether they show transfer from their L1. Specifically, we ask whether they apply their native assimilation rule and/or fail to apply the L2 assimilation rule in their L2 speech. Using a French reading task, we examined the amount of French voicing assimilation and English-like place assimilation in the productions of both early and advanced late English-French bilinguals. Using a speech recognizer with specific pronunciation variants, we found that the late bilinguals showed evidence for transfer of place assimilation, as well as a reduction in the amount of voicing assimilation compared to that of native French controls. The early bilinguals did not differ from the French controls in terms of place assimilation, but their voicing assimilation rate was intermediate between those of the French controls and the late bilinguals.

**Authors:**

Sharon Peperkamp: Ecole Normale Supérieure - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; Sonya Kaiser: Ecole Normale Supérieure - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; Lori Lamel: CNRS-LISN; Martine ADDA-DECKER: CNRS

Cross-linguistic transfer of phonological assimilation in early and late bilinguals

This study examines the general claim that bilingualism, leads to a facilitatory effect on cognitive control. Repeatedly resolving conflict between simultaneously active representations is thought to spill over into other domains involving conflict resolution. Recent literature indicates that the effects of bilingualism on executive functions need examination with a more comprehensive characterization of bilingualism and the use of multiple measures of executive control (Backer & Bortfeld, 2021; K. R. Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Here, we operationalize bilingualism using a set of continuous variables related to language knowledge and use. Next, we employ Bayesian regression analyses to assess the evidence for the null, i.e. the lack of an effect of bilingualism. We aimed to be able to respond to current arguments in favor of an advantage that appeal to the measurement of bilingualism, its task-specificity and the methodological issues that exist with widely used tasks such as the Simon, Stroop or Flanker (K. R. Paap, Anders-Jefferson, Zimiga, Mason, & Mikulinsky, 2020).In this study, we assess the effects of bilingualism under a newly specified mechanism of attentional control (Bialystok & Craik, 2022), specifically in sustained attention. We also administer new tasks, developed to be psychometrically sound and an improvement to existing measures of attentional control by (Draheim, Tsukahara, Martin, Mashburn, & Engle, 2021). Two sustained attention tasks, along with two versions of the Flanker task were administered. The null model was the best model (with the greatest posterior probability) for all tasks. Bilingualism-related characteristics failed to show reliable influence for both sustained attention tasks. Even for ”improved measures” less susceptible to methodological flaws related to RT impurity and processing confounds, the best model was the null model. The results imply that the source of null effects is not the inadequate choice of inhibition as an explanatory mechanism. We conclude that bilingualism does not have coherent and consistent effects on cognitive control (specified as either inhibition or sustained attention) and the lack of an effect is not specific to the type of conflict involved in a task or its reliance on reaction times.

**Authors:**

Moulshree Rana: Radboud University; Ark Verma: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Effects of Bilingualism on Sustained Attention and Inhibition: A Bayesian Enquiry

The semantic representation of abstract words is a topic of discussion within the embodied cognition framework. Existing theories propose the involvement of emotional, linguistic, and social experiences in abstract word representation. Focusing on the socialness — a variable with limited empirical evidence — our study explores whether (some) abstract words are associated with richer social experiences. Two social semantic priming categorization tasks (explicit and implicit) and a lexical decision task were conducted to examine socialness and its interaction with concreteness. We closely mirrored these tasks by running similar experiments with emotional valence — a variable known to influence processing of abstract words. Our results show that high socialness and emotional valence both impact the recognition of abstract words in explicit tasks only. Conclusively, we find no evidence supporting a non-strategic effect of socialness and valence on abstract words recognition, challenging existing theories about their roles as grounding variables for abstract words.

**Authors:**

Daria Goriachun: Aix-Marseille University; Kristof Strijkers: CNRS & Aix-Marseille University; Nuria Gala: Aix-Marseille University; Johannes C. Ziegler: Aix-Marseille University

Investigating social grounding of abstract words

From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the recent Hollywood blockbuster Arrival, the notion of time-travel is a firmly established narrative trope. And yet tales of travel back-and-forth through time are essentially non-existent before the mid-19th century. This invites the question: How do people make sense of time-travel, and how does it build on the more basic building-blocks of our conception of time itself? Here, we investigate lay conceptions of time-travel using a gesture elicitation paradigm. Participants watched brief videos of time-travel stories and then recounted the plots. Combining qualitative analysis and machine learning extraction of co-speech gesture trajectories, we describe how participants’ construals of time-travel cobble together more basic spatial construals time (e.g., length-duration; past-left vs. future-right), combined to create layered, ad-hoc, flexible representations of time. We discuss implications for how spatial metaphor can offer a foundation for more complex, elaborated forms of reasoning and understanding.

**Authors:**

Shervin Nosrati: University of California, Merced; Leo Niehorster-Cook: University of California, Merced; Tyler Marghetis: University of California, Merced

Spatial Construals of Time... Travel

Just as we intuitively know that "chair" and "boy" denote referents in different categories, we know that "standing" falls into a different category from "walking": One of the events is static, the other dynamic. In three self-paced reading experiments, we show that such differences in event dynamicity leads to expectations about the temporal structure of complex events. We replicate and extend Gennari (2004): Participants read complement (Exp.1) and relative clause constructions (Exp.2,3) in which the event type in the subordinate clause (i.e., event/state) and temporal proximity between main and subordinate clause situations (i.e., close/overlap vs. distant/non-overlap) were manipulated. Consistent with Gennari (2004), we find evidence that people expect states to overlap (Exp.1,2), but only when in line with their expectation that states should happen first in time (Exp.3). Our results support a multifactorial model of language comprehension in which event structure is central to the formation of temporal expectations.

**Authors:**

Elena Marx: Central European University; Eva Wittenberg: Central European University

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