Netherlands

Causality is a shared general experience, but languages differ in the way they encode it. This research explores the possible correlation between society type, language and causal attribution in the way Spanish speakers think and judge causality. 202 native speakers of European and American Spanish participated in three different studies: (i) an adaptation of Singelis’ (1994) psychological questionnaire for social in(ter)dependency; (ii) a non-verbal categorisation task for the attribution of causal responsibility; and (iii) a multimodal description task for causal events. Data were elicited with a set of 58 causal videoclips from the CAL project (NSF,BCS-1535846).
Results show that all Spanish speakers, regardless of their Western (Spain) or Eastern (Latin America) backgrounds, categorise and linguistically describe causality based on the degree of the action’s intentionality. A strong correlation between language and causal categorisation was found, supporting the idea that language is a determining factor in the causal attribution.

**Authors:**

Andrea Ariño Bizarro: University of Zaragoza; Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano: University of Zaragoza

CogSci 2024

Language influences how Spanish speakers from different cultural backgrounds think, talk, and gesture about causality

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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**Friday, July 26** 
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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 
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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 
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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!

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**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

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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.

Many of the most interesting and vexing problems in linguistic analysis concern structures that have a hybrid character---they show evidence of belonging to two, independently motivated structural types. Proposals often assign them to one or the other class, requiring complication of the theory to handle their exceptionality. We suggest that there is no satisfactory answer to such conundrums under standard, type-based representational theories, for those theories are founded on discrete topologies. As an alternative, we propose Metric Grammars--grammatical systems founded on connected topologies (specifically on manifolds on which we can define continuous-valued metrics---e.g., Euclidean distance). Such topologies are the natural residence of dynamical systems. Indeed, dynamical systems theory has identified a formal phenomenon--the bifurcation---that naturally models phenomena that lie between types. In fact, bifurcations are often used to model structural transitions. Therefore, to explore the possible relevance of our novel representational approach, we focus on transitional linguistic phenomena, namely diachronic grammaticalization episodes. These are cases where, over the course of the history of a language, a morpheme (or combination of morphemes) gradually changes its grammatical status. We build a metric grammar---a recurrent map that has a neural network at its core---which has the property of changing its grammatical system slightly with each instance of language experience. Focusing on a particular episode from the history of English---the development of "sort of" and "kind of" from Noun-Preposition structures into adverbs---we provide evidence that the metric grammar exhibits statistical anticipation of categorical change, a phenomenon that has been documented for several grammaticalization episodes and is difficult to account for with discrete-topology models.

**Authors:**

Whitney Tabor: University of Connecticut; Hyosun Lee: UConn – Storrs and Regional Campuses

Metric Grammars

Code-switching, that is, the alternation between different languages in a single utterance, provides a unique window into language control mechanisms. Prior studies suggest that bilinguals upregulate their cognitive control when reading sentences that start in one language and end in another (e.g., Adler et al. 2020; Bosma & Pablos, 2020). The current project investigates whether more common types of code-switches and different modalities engage cognitive control differently. We had early Spanish-English bilinguals listen to (Experiments 1, 2), or read (Experiment 3) sentences that were in Spanish only, or included dense or insertional switches to English. After each sentence participants responded to a Flanker trial. In contrast to prior findings, we either found no effect (Exp. 1), or a larger Flanker conflict effect after a switch vs. a unilingual sentence (Exp. 2 and 3). We therefore have no evidence that processing common types of code-switches upregulates cognitive control.

**Authors:**

Edith Kaan: University of Florida; Rodrigo Mello Medina: University of Florida; Guadalupe Maria Diaz: University of Florida; Kirthana Sane: University of Florida; Savannah Chandler: University of Florida; Matt Neitz: University of Florida; Claire Kuntz: University of Florida; Jorge Valdés Kroff: University of Florida; Souad Kheder: University of Florida

Testing the effects of distinct code-switching types on cognitive control

Some German adjective-compound-noun constructions (‘severe storm.warning’) exhibit a bracketing paradox where an adjective semantically modifies the first noun N1 instead of the grammatically required last noun N2 thus violating compositionality. We present two experiments that examined the interpretation of nominal compounds and bracketing paradoxes. Experiment 1 showed that the semantic match of N1 and the adjective has a significant impact on the acceptability of Adj-N1N2 constructions. Experiment 2 probed the participants’ adjective attachment choices as well as the relationship between and attachment and acceptability: While N2 attachments were most common, many constructions received mixed and some consistently bracketing paradox interpretations. High ratings for Adj-N2 were predictive of N2 attachment, but high Adj-N1 ratings led to bracketing paradox interpretations. These results are partially against grammatical expectations and suggest competition between the nouns for modification, likely due to semantic and/or pragmatic factors.

**Authors:**

Anna Pryslopska: University of Stuttgart; Titus von der Malsburg: University of Stuttgart

Severe Storm Warnings for Four-Story Homeowners: Towards a Processing Model of Bracketing Paradoxes

The automaticity of syntax has been a long-debated topic in psycholinguistics. One strategy to establish it involves finding significant evidence of syntactic priming in experimental tasks that restrict conscious awareness. Two common criteria to assess the unconscious nature of priming are that visibility (d’) of masked words is not significantly different from zero, and that visibility is not positively correlated with the size of the priming effect. Unfortunately, these outcomes may also arise from low statistical power in visibility data and low reliability of dependent measures. We report results of a meta-analysis and a Bayesian re-analysis, which revealed low statistical power and evidence that "subliminal" words were actually visible for participants. Additionally, reliability analyses on Berkovitch and Dehaene’s (2019) dataset showed that noisy measures may account for the lack of correlation between visibility and priming. These findings question the validity of previous results supporting the automatic nature of syntactic processing.

**Authors:**

David Hernández-Gutiérrez: Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL); Dr Miguel A. Sorrel: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; David Shanks: University College London; Dr Miguel A. Vadillo: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Is masked syntactic priming unconscious?

Cognitively reappraising a stressful situation—reinterpreting it to lessen its emotional impact—is effective for regulating negative emotions. When reappraising, English speakers engage in linguistic distancing, spontaneously using words that are more abstract and impersonal. Previous work showed that this pattern generalizes to Spanish but was equivocal as to whether features specific to Spanish—like estar (“to be” for temporary states)—are recruited during reappraisal. Here we revisited this possibility. Spanish-English bilinguals from majority Spanish-speaking countries (N = 138) transcribed their thoughts in each of their languages while responding naturally to negative images or reappraising them. Reappraisal increased conventional markers of linguistic distancing in both languages and Spanish-specific markers in Spanish. The latter result was driven by the use of estar, which was associated with reduced negative affect after reappraising. Our findings show that speakers of different languages deploy somewhat different linguistic tools when regulating their emotions.

**Authors:**

Kevin J. Holmes: Reed College; Lena Kassin: Reed College; Daniela Buchillon-Almeida: Reed College; Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez: Reed College

How Language Use Reflects Emotion Regulation: Evidence from Spanish

We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash’ children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear’ or ‘the small plate’) and pay attention to their interlocutor’s face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker’s referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor’s face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.

**Authors:**

Paula Rubio-Fernández: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Madeleine Long: University of Edinburgh; Vishakha Shukla: New York University; Vrinda Bhatia: Jawaharlal Nehru University; Anwesha Mahapatra: Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr. Chetan Ralekar: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Shlomit Ben-Ami: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pawan Sinha: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development

Throughout evolutionary history, and in everyday lives, it has been a crucial task to identify good and reliable cooperation partners. A good way of assessing potential partners’ quality and willingness is to engage in conversation with them. We investigated if non-verbal behaviours during such conversations can be reliable indicators of interactants’ cooperativeness – in contrast to the semantic content of utterances that can be easily faked. Specifically, we predicted that interactants who align in their use of non-verbal behaviours would also act more cooperatively in other tasks beyond the conversation. To test this, we analyzed gestures in the British TV game show Golden Balls, where contestants discussed and faced a game-theoretic decision to split or steal a monetary prize. Results suggest that individuals choosing to split indeed align their non-verbal behaviours more than those choosing to steal. This implies that subtle movements can serve as reliable indicators of trustworthy cooperation partners.

**Authors:**

Klaudia Karkowska: Nicolaus Copernicus University; Darya Namednikava: Centre for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University ; Marek Placiński: Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; Michael Pleyer: Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; Theresa Matzinger: University of Vienna

The relationship between non-verbal alignment and cooperativeness in a game theory-based TV show

The process of adaptation to the partner in the course of an interaction is still not well understood. In the case of explanatory dialogues, to provide satisfying explanations, explainers have to consider the needs of the explainees. This requires mental representations of the explainees, i.e., “partner models”. Little is known about whether and how modifications of partner models during an explanation take place. We assumed that they get informed by the interactive behaviour of the explainee and investigated partner models in dependence on explainees’ verbal moves. A total of 59 dyadic explanations were investigated in an observation study. The comparison of the partner models before and after the explanation showed changes regarding, e.g., knowledge, interest in the explanation, cooperation, and mood. Moves such as questions as well as summarising and paraphrasing information given by the explainee were associated with the partner model dimensions interest in the explanation and co-construction.

**Authors:**

Heike M. Buhl: Paderborn University; Josephine Beryl Fisher: University Paderborn; Katharina Rohlfing: Paderborn University

Changes in Partner Models – Effects of Adaptivity in the Course of Explanations

Numbers are not only used for quantification (cardinals), but also for sequencing (ordinals), and identifying entities (nominals). For example, the sentence “Player number 23 took 2nd place by scoring 3 goals” features nominal, ordinal, and cardinal uses of numbers, in that order. Claims about the relative prevalence of these uses (Wiese, 2004, Niederer 2005) have never been tested. We present the first large-scale analysis of 3,600 numbers in context, showing that cardinal uses are dominant (83.4%), followed by ordinals (11.8%), and then nominals (4.8%). Round numbers, which are associated with approximation, dominate for cardinals (76.4%) but not ordinals (31.1%) or nominals (23.3%). The prevalence of round numbers increases with magnitude only for cardinals. We discuss implications for the logarithmic scaling of the mental number line (Dehaene & Mehler, 1992), the approximate number system (e.g., Rinaldi & Marelli, 2020), and children’s acquisition of number concepts (e.g., Colomé & Noël, 2012).

**Authors:**

Greg Woodin: University of Birmingham; Bodo Winter: University of Birmingham

Numbers in context: Cardinals, ordinals, and nominals

It is now well-established that the visual features of objects influence the sounds we make to refer to them. This is called sound symbolism. We present the results of a two-part study that explores the extent to which the visual features of writing systems correspond to the smallest spoken units of language. In Study 1, participants (n = 322) classified the shape of a set of glyphs, representative of the world’s script families. The purpose was to create an open-source database of normed glyphs for future research in cognitive linguistics. In Study 2, participants (n = 73) were prompted to select either a round or angular glyph after hearing one of two kinds of phonemes (vowel or consonant) from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Results from a logistic regression suggest that the type of sound had a significant effect on the choice of glyph, and that vowel sounds increased the likelihood of choosing round glyphs by 30%. The significant correlation between what subjects heard and their choice of glyph suggests that the effect may extend to such sound symbolic relations in real-world writing systems. Our ongoing research seeks to substantiate these findings with increased glyph contrast and more diverse populations.

**Authors:**

Alexander Porto: Duquesne University; Alexander Basalyga: Independent Researcher; Mr. Nikolai Huckle: SCHUFA Holding AG; Julio Santiago: University of Granada; Elizabeth Fein: Duquesne University; Alexander Kranjec: Duquesne University

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