Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

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

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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) 
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**Friday, July 26** 
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1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
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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) 

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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.

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

States overlap: Evidence from complement and relative clause comprehension

Children frequently use under-informative expressions (e.g., Side) while describing Left-Right relations between objects but use gestures to disambiguate the relative locations of objects (Karadöller et al., 2022). Here, we ask how children collect visual information about the spatial relations they express when planning such descriptions. Twenty Turkish-speaking 8-year-olds saw displays with four pictures of the same two objects in various spatial configurations. Target pictures described to a confederate depicted left-right relations (e.g., lemon left to box). Descriptions were coded as whether they were informative in speech, informative with gesture, or under-informative. Children had more target fixations when planning (1) informative than under-informative descriptions (β=0.515, SE=0.131, p<0.001); (2) descriptions that are informative with gesture than informative in speech (β=-0.827, SE=0.171, p<0.001). Results extend previous literature showing that visual attention changes as a function of informativeness and the modality (Ünal et al., 2022) of the description for 8-year-old children.

**Authors:**

Dilay Z. Karadoller: Middle East Technical University; Asli Ozyurek: Donders Institute ; Ercenur Ünal: Özyeğin University

Children’s visual attention when planning informative multimodal descriptions of object locations

In the remote triad task, participants judge the relatedness between randomly chosen words in a three-alternative choice triadic judgement task. While most word pairs in these triads are weakly related, humans agree on which to choose. This is theoretically interesting as it contradicts previous claims that suggest that the notion of similarity is unconstrained in principle (e.g., Goodman,1972). Here, we present new evidence from GPT-4, showing that context-aware LLMs provide excellent predictions of this task. Moreover, the strength of this effect was even larger than that found for basic-level comparisons, which involve highly similar items. Together, this implies that the similarity of human representations is highly structured at every scale, even in tasks with limited context. Follow-up analysis provides insights into how LLMs are successful in this task. Further implications of the ability to compare words at every scale are discussed.

**Authors:**

Simon De Deyne: University of Melbourne

Evaluating human-like similarity biases at every scale in Large Language Models: Evidence from remote and basic-level triads.

Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with {Object-before-Subject} (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with {Subject-before-Object} (SOV) order. Although this difficulty diminishes with appropriate discourse context, the underlying cognitive factors responsible for alleviating processing challenges in OSV sentences remain a question. In this work, we test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of non-canonical (OSV) syntactic choices, especially when controlling for information status such as givenness and surprisal measures. We extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB) that contain clearly-defined subjects and objects, systematically permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and deploy a classifier to discern original corpus sentences from artificially generated alternatives. The classifier leverages various discourse-based and cognitive features, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status, to inform its predictions. Our results suggest that, although there exists a predilection for minimizing dependency length in non-canonical corpus sentences amidst the generated variants, this factor does not significantly contribute in predicting corpus sentence above and beyond surprisal and givenness measures. Notably, the discourse predictability emerges as the primary determinant of constituent-order preferences. These findings are further supported by human evaluations involving 44 native Hindi speakers. Overall, this work sheds light on the role of expectation adaptation in word-ordering decisions. We conclude by situating our results within the theories of discourse production and information locality.

**Authors:**

Sidharth Ranjan: University of Stuttgart; Marten van Schijndel: Cornell University

Does Dependency Locality Predict Non-canonical Word Order in Hindi?

This study addressed the role of numeral interpretation for risky-choice and attribute framing effects by investigating the effects of three numeral modifiers. In Experiment 1, in which the numerals were modified with (the German equivalent of) exactly to enforce a precise reading, there were significant framing effects. Experiment 2 (risky-choice framing) and Experiment 3 (attribute framing) addressed the effects of (the German equivalents of) at most and up to. Both modifiers set an upper bound. Yet, they exhibit a sharp contrast in evaluative contexts. In Experiment 2, there was a significant interaction of modifier and frame, with a reversed framing effect for at most and a standard framing effect for up to. The modifier-by-frame interaction effect was replicated in Experiment 3 for attribute framing. These findings are difficult to reconcile with extant accounts of framing effects and are especially challenging for accounts according to which framing effects result from lower-bound readings of bare numerals. The findings can be captured in a semantic-pragmatic valence account.

**Authors:**

Berry Claus: Leibniz University Hannover; Marie Christin Walch: Leibniz Universität Hannover

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