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Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, English allows infinite free embedding of the prenominal genitive -s, whereas the postnominal genitive of is largely restricted to one level and to a limited set of items. Therefore, speakers need to learn from experience which specific structures allow free embedding and which do not. One effort to account for the underlying learning mechanism, the distributional learning proposal, suggests the recursion of a structure (e.g. X1’s- X2) is licensed if X1 position and X2 position are productively substitutable in the input. A series of corpus studies have confirmed the availability of such distributional cues in child directed speech. The present study further tests the distributional learning proposal with an artificial language learning experiment.

CogSci 2021

Distributional learning of recursive structures

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

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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. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

poster

Inference-making is a complex mental process as it involves retrieving prior knowledge and active meaning-making, appropriate for exploring processing automaticity vs. difficulty in different languages. People are prone to falsely recognizing sentences that represent the inferences they made due to gist encoding. To examine whether this process differs for L1 and L2, we presented forty-eight Turkish-English bilingual participants in Turkish, English, and dual-language sentence groups that allowed them to configure objects mentally and draw spatial inferences. Inferred sentences were recognized significantly more than new sentences. We observed this in L1 and L2, but not the dual-language condition. Higher L2 proficiency and lower executive functioning abilities were related to higher false recognition. These results are aligned with the bilingual memory organization, suggesting L2 approaches L1 automaticity with increased proficiency. Lower EF participants might prefer less effortful strategies to process information, such as averaging, abstracting, inferring, and gist extracting.

Bilinguals Infer in L2 Similarly, but not in Dual-language

Experimental pragmatics tells us that a metaphor conveys salient features of a vehicle and that highly typical features tend to be salient. But can highly atypical features also be salient? When asking if John is loyal and hearing “John is a fox”, will the hearer conclude that John is disloyal because loyalty is saliently atypical for a fox? This prediction follows from our RSA-based model of metaphor understanding which relies on gradient salience. Our behavioral experiments corroborate the model's predictions, providing evidence that high and low typicality are salient and result in high interpretation confidence and agreement, while average typicality is not salient and makes a metaphor confusing. Our model implements the idea that other features of a vehicle, along with possible alternative vehicles, influence metaphor interpretation. It produces a significantly better fit compared to an existing RSA model of metaphor understanding, supporting our predictions about the factors at play.

Pragmatics of Metaphor Revisited: Formalizing the Role of Typicality and Alternative Utterances in Metaphor Understanding

Research shows that anxiety can disrupt learning processes, but few studies have examined anxiety’s relationships to online learning behaviors. This study considers the interplay between students’ anxiety about science and behavior within an online system designed to support self-regulated science inquiry. Using the searching, monitoring, assessing, rehearsing, and translating (SMART) classification schema for self-regulated learning (SRL), we leverage microanalysis of self-regulated behaviors to better understand how science anxiety inhibits (or supports) different learning operations. Specifically, we show that while science anxiety is positively associated with searching behaviors, it is negatively associated with monitoring behaviors, suggesting that anxious students may avoid evaluation, opting instead to compensate with information-seeking. These findings help us to better understand SRL processes and may also help us support anxious students in developing SRL strategies.

Who’s Stopping You? – Using Microanalysis to Explore the Impact of Science Anxiety on Self-Regulated Learning Operations

Most psychological studies focused on how people reason about generative causation, in which a cause produces an effect. We study the prevention of effects both on the general and singular level. A general prevention query might ask how strongly a vaccine is expected to reduce the risk of contracting COVID-19, whereas a singular prevention query might ask whether the absence of COVID-19 in a vaccinated person actually resulted from this person's vaccination. We propose a computational model answering how knowledge about the general strength of a preventive cause can be used to assess whether a preventive link is instantiated in a singular case. We also discuss how psychological models of causal strength learning relate to mathematical models of vaccination efficacy used in medical research. The results of an experiment suggest that many, but not all people differentiate between preventive strength and singular prevention queries, in line with the formal model.

Evaluating General versus Singular Causal Prevention

When asked to paraphrase semantically strained sentences (e.g., the lantern limped), participants alter word meanings to fit the context (e.g., the light flickered). Judges who were asked to classify these meaning extensions classified verb extensions as primarily metaphoric and noun extensions as primarily taxonomic or metonymic/associative (King & Gentner, 2019; in prep.). To determine whether these online patterns are reflected in established word senses, we sampled 120 nouns and 120 verbs from three different frequency bands (100 wpm, 10 wpm, and 1 wpm) and obtained metaphoricity ratings of every sense for each word (1015 senses total, Oxford Dictionary API). Verb senses were rated as significantly more metaphoric than noun senses overall. In addition, metaphoricity increased as sense frequency decreased, and this effect was stronger for verbs than for nouns. Verbs’ high propensity for metaphoric extension has implications for evolution of word meanings.

Verbs are More Metaphoric than Nouns: Evidence from the Lexicon

This study examined relations between teacher-child closeness and conflict in preschool and children’s behavior problems, social skills, and executive function (EF) in kindergarten, and explored if these relations are moderated by parental education. The study also sought to examine the relation between teacher-child closeness and conflict and the subscales of children’s behavior problems and social skills. The sample consisted of 126 preschool children (M = 56.70 months, SD = 3.89). Regression analyses revealed that teacher-child conflict predicted children’s social skills, specifically assertion, engagement, and cooperation. Parental education moderated the association between teacher-child conflict and EF, and also emerged as a marginally significant moderator of teacher-child closeness and behavior problems. The findings thereby indicated differential relations between teacher-child closeness and conflict and children’s outcomes. With regard to future research, it may be important to consider other aspects of the teacher-child relationship and classroom environment as well.

The association between preschool teacher-child relationship and children’s kindergarten outcomes

On the road to a more fair and just world, we must recognize ubiquitous disparities in our society, but awareness alone is not enough: Observed disparities between groups often get wrongly attributed to inherent traits (e.g., African Americans are disproportionately arrested because they are more prone to crime), creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop. As shown in a past study (Meng & Xu, 2020), such reasoning can result from the Naive Utility Calculus (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016): If an agent knows a target trait's "hit rate'' in every group and avoids unnecessary sampling, it is rational to infer that groups sampled from more often have higher hit rates. The previous study used non-social categories (robot chickens) as stimuli, which raises the question of whether the results generalize to the social domain. In the current study, we replicated past findings using novel social groups (aliens): Overall, people were more likely to check groups examined more often by the agent but when observed hit rates did not support the agent's sampling behavior, people incorporated both information sources to infer group hit rates. This work brought NUC-based models one step closer towards tackling disparities in the real world consisted of social groups.

Naive Utility Calculus underlies the reproduction of disparities in social groups

In two studies we show that a speaker’s choice to obey or violate the pragmatic maxims of Relevance and Informativeness – as well as the reasons behind these choices (Inability vs. Unwillingness) – affect how the speaker is socially perceived, revealing a connection between pragmatic reasoning and social evaluation. Our findings further suggest that core dimensions of social evaluation (Competence vs. Warmth) are differentially informed by different aspects of a speaker’s conversational behavior. We conclude that, even after a brief exposure to someone’s conversational behavior, people draw social inferences about the speaker by reasoning along the same principles that inform pragmatic inferences. Our results highlight how pragmatic reasoning, social evaluation and person perception jointly underlie the meaning conveyed by linguistic utterances in communication.

We Are What We Say: Pragmatic Violations Have Social Costs

Narratives (sequences of purposively related concrete situations) and arguments (reasoning and conclusions in an attempt to persuade) are distinct cornerstones of human discourse. While theories of their linguistic structures exist, it is unclear which theorized features influence perception of narrative and argument quality. Furthermore, differences in their usage over time and across formal versus informal mediums remain unexplored. Thus, we use an original dataset of news and Reddit discourse (consisted of >10,000 clauses), annotated for clause-level discourse elements (e.g., generic statements vs. events; Smith, 2003), and their coherence relations (e.g., cause/effect; Wolf & Gibson, 2005). We identify the features that correspond to differing perceptions of narrative and argument quality across multiple dimensions. Since the documents cover marijuana legalization discourse during a period of massive attitude shift in the U.S. (2008-2019), we also examine changes over time in discourse structure within this rapidly evolving sociopolitical context.

The Anatomy of Discourse: Linguistic Predictors of Narrative and Argument Quality

The physical properties of space may be universal, but the way people conceptualize space is not. In some groups, people tend to use egocentric space (e.g. left, right) to encode the locations of objects, while in other groups, people encode the same spatial scene using allocentric space (e.g. upriver, downriver). These different spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) characterize the way people talk about spatial relations and the way they think about them, even when they are not using language. Although spatial language and spatial thinking tend to covary, the root causes of this variation are unclear. Here we propose that this variation in FoR use reflects the spatial discriminability of the relevant spatial continua. In an initial test of this proposal in a group of indigenous Bolivians, we compared FoR use across spatial axes that are known to differ in discriminability. In two non-verbal tests, participants spontaneously used different FoRs on different spatial axes: On the lateral axis, where egocentric (left-right) discrimination is difficult, their behavior was predominantly allocentric; on the sagittal axis, where egocentric (front-back) discrimination is relatively easy, their behavior was predominantly egocentric. These findings support the spatial discriminability hypothesis, which may explain variation in spatial concepts not only across axes, but also across groups, between individuals, and over development.

Distributional learning of recursive structures

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Bilinguals Infer in L2 Similarly, but not in Dual-language

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