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What makes a word easy to learn? We know that early-learned words tend to be frequent and name concrete referents. Here we investigate a novel predictor--a word&#39;s surprisal -- the ease of predicting it given a context. We computed surprisal for words in child-directed speech and used it to predict age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for known predictors such as concreteness, frequency, and the mean length of the utterances in which the word appeared. Predicates with greater surprisal (i.e., those less predictable from context) were learned later. Noun learning was not dependent on surprisal. Surprisal was a powerful mediator of both frequency and concreteness, reducing the ordinarily strong effect of frequency and concreteness on AoA. Differences in surprisal across languages also proved to be moderately predictive of differences in AoA across languages: translation equivalents that had higher surprisal had later AoAs.

CogSci 2021

Does surprisal affect word learning? Evidence from seven languages

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
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IEEE RO-MAN 2022

31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

What makes a word easy to learn? We know that early-learned words tend to be frequent and name concrete referents. Here we investigate a novel predictor--a word's surprisal -- the ease of predicting it given a context. We computed surprisal for words in child-directed speech and used it to predict age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for known predictors such as concreteness, frequency, and the mean length of the utterances in which the word appeared. Predicates with greater surprisal (i.e., those less predictable from context) were learned later. Noun learning was not dependent on surprisal. Surprisal was a powerful mediator of both frequency and concreteness, reducing the ordinarily strong effect of frequency and concreteness on AoA. Differences in surprisal across languages also proved to be moderately predictive of differences in AoA across languages: translation equivalents that had higher surprisal had later AoAs.

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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.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year! 

**Your Program Chairs,**
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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).

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.

Research shows that language processing mechanisms are permeable to the speaker’s accent, but virtually no data exists on non-literal language. Our online rating study investigated whether accent-based biases could hinder making inferences from ironic speech. Ninety-six participants listened to dialogues between native and foreign-accented English speakers and rated them on several scales. We found that the ironic intent in the accented speech was missed significantly more often than in the native speech for all irony types. Importantly, participants’ individual differences significantly affected the ratings and interacted with both accent and irony-type. More conservative participants were worse at detecting irony than their liberal peers but this effect was stronger for accented speech and a rarer irony type. In contrast, high empathy facilitated irony detection. The results demonstrate that interpersonal variation in personality and moral values affects language comprehension and needs to be accounted for in models of language processing.

Oh, the Irony!: Interpersonal Variation in the Processing of Foreign-Accented and Native Irony

This study investigated the effect of gustatory stimuli on the associative learning of new (meaningless) word forms in a first language. Japanese native speakers performed the following tasks: (1) subjective evaluations of gustatory stimuli; (2) learning tasks of associative pairs of a new word form and gustatory stimulus (G) or only new word forms (W); (3) recognition memory tasks associated with the G/W condition; (4) free recall task for the G/W conditions. The accuracy rates of W were highest, whereas there was no significant difference between free recall scores. Subjective evaluations of gustatory stimuli negatively correlated with the free recall performance of word forms associated with the gustatory stimuli, while accuracy rates of the recognition and free recall tasks of G were positively correlated. Accordingly, learning new word forms on their own is more effective than associative learning of new word forms and gustatory stimuli in one day of learning.

Associative learning of new word forms in a first language and gustatory stimuli

Corpus data suggests that frequent words have lower rates of replacement and regularization. It is not clear, however, whether this holds due to stronger selection against innovation among high-frequency words or due to weaker drift at high frequencies. Here, we report two experiments designed to probe this question. Participants were tasked with learning a simple miniature language consisting of two nouns and two plural markers. After exposing plural markers to drift and selection of varying strengths, we tracked noun regularization. Regularization was greater for low- than for high-frequency nouns, with no detectable effect of selection. Our results therefore suggest that lower rates of regularization of more frequent words may be due to drift alone.

Regularization of nouns due to drift, not selection: An artificial-language experiment

English clause-embedding verbs can be used in the evidential meaning (Simons, 2007; Murray, 2017), modulating the degree to which the speaker is committed to the truth of the
proposition in the embedded clause. For example, an utterance like “I think the movie starts at 4” can signal that the speaker is uncertain whether the proposition the movie starts at 4 is true, and would like to attenuate their claim. Previous research has provided detailed accounts of lexical and contextual features that give rise to evidential meanings — however, less is known about how widespread these uses are, whether they are part of the verb’s lexical meaning, or emerge under certain pragmatic conditions. In this study, we addressed these questions by conducting two large-scale acceptability judgment experiments. In line with the observations in literature (Simons, 2007), we found that non-factive clause-embedding verbs are the most acceptable in evidential contexts. We also found, however, that even highly factive verbs can be acceptable as evidentials under favorable pragmatic conditions.

Evidential meaning of English clause-embedding verbs

Studies on the processing, functional, and social distribution of spoken and signed languages suggest partial overlaps between the mental lexicon of deaf and hearers. However, factors such as ontogenetic development, language acquisition conditions, the development of deaf culture, and the lexical repertoire available in each language suggest important differences. The aim was to explore the semantic networks of the conceptual domains of space and time in the Uruguayan deaf signers' population and Spanish hearers. 60 participants carried out a word association task in their respective languages and with semantically equivalent lexical items. Both groups showed an important formal similarity between their semantic networks. Mainly, a categorical-semantic analysis showed a bias of the hearers to taxonomic and introspective semantic relationships. In contrast, the deaf showed a bias toward situational semantic relationships and entities. These findings suggest differences in the concrete / abstract thinking between both populations when organizing their mental lexicon.

Semantic networks of space and time between deaf signers and Spanish listeners

Metaphors can both shape and reflect how we think about com- plex issues. Here, we explore the prevalence of WAR language in a large corpus (N = 1.63 million) of Tweets. We compare how different groups of people use the language of WAR to talk about different topics. In Study 1, we find that about 5% of Tweets about Covid-19 from the general public include WAR language, replicating prior work (Wicke & Bolognesi, 2020). In Studies 2 and 3, we find that politicians use WAR language much more often, while Reporters and Medical Experts use WAR language less often. The findings are relevant to current debates about the role of language in democracy, and to theo- ries of metaphor in communication.

War Language in Tweets of Politicians, Reporters, and Medical Experts: A Focus on Covid-19

Prediction is pervasive during sentence comprehension among native speakers of a language. But whether non-native speakers predict to the same extent as native speakers remains an open question. To examine the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability in native and non-native speakers, we con- ducted a self-paced reading and an acceptability judgement task. The results suggest that the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability are unequivocally robust among native speakers during sentence comprehension. However, the effects of syntactic predictability seem to be more robust for native speakers than for non-native speakers who are largely sensitive to semantic predictability.

Effects of syntactic and semantic predictability on sentence comprehension: A comparison between native and non-native speakers

How does the acquisition of semantically complex expressions track the acquisition of their constituent meanings? We investigate this question using the English quantifiers both and either. These quantifiers, while morphologically simplex, are semantically complex, comprising of two pieces: (i) universal/existential quantification and (ii) a size restriction on the quantificational domain to 2. Across two experiments, we compared the acquisition of these quantifiers with expressions mapping conceptual pieces that contribute to their make-up (two, all, any). Our results suggest that having all of the parts is not enough to put together the whole, a finding that could have implications for quantifier learning more broadly.

More than the sum of its parts: Acquiring semantically complex quantifiers

Singular they has become increasingly common as a personal pronoun of reference for non-binary individuals and in use with generic referents. While previous accounts of the licensing conditions of they are primarily syntactic, pragmatics may also play a role. By Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991), speakers who use they rather than a more specific gender marked pronoun are potentially signaling that they do not know the antecedent’s gender or that it is not relevant to their current goals. This would predict that socially close referents would be less felicitous antecedents for they. In this study, participants made judgments for nine types of antecedents. Gender marking, specificity, and social distance had reliable effects on acceptability. In addition, cluster analyses indicated that participants naturally fell into three groups, which align with those predicted by Konnelly and Cowper (2020). Individuals who were younger, more open to non-binary gender, and had more experience with non-binary individuals accepted they in more situations.

They is Changing: Pragmatic and Grammatical Factors that License Singular they

In English, Subject Relative Clauses are processed more quickly than Object Relative Clauses, but open questions remain about where in the clause slowdown occurs. The surprisal theory of incremental processing, under which processing difficulty corresponds to probabilistic expectations about upcoming material, predicts that slowdown should occur immediately on material that disambiguates the subject from object relative clause. However, evidence from eye tracking and self-paced reading studies suggests that slowdown occurs downstream of RC-disambiguating material, on the relative clause verb. These methods, however, suffer from well-known spillover effects which makes their results difficult to interpret. To address these issues, we introduce and deploy a novel variant of the Maze task for reading times (Forster, Guerrera, & Elliot, 2009), called the Interpolated Maze in two English web-based experiments. In Experiment 1, we find that the locus of reading-time differences between SRCs and ORCs falls on immediate disambiguating definite determiner. Experiment 2 provides a control, showing that ORCs are read more slowly than lexically-matching, non-anomalous material. These results provide new evidence for the locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses and support the surprisal theory of incremental processing.

Does surprisal affect word learning? Evidence from seven languages

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Oh, the Irony!: Interpersonal Variation in the Processing of Foreign-Accented and Native Irony

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