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By 24 months, children rapidly infer the meanings of words from sentence context: for instance, inferring from “She eats the dax” that “dax” refers to a food item. However, prior work has typically presented these informative sentence contexts in the presence of the target referent; it is less clear whether sentence context on one exposure will influence learners’ referential hypotheses on subsequent exposures. Here, we present results suggesting that even adults have some difficulty using a word’s prior sentence context to constrain its subsequent hypothesized referents, and 3-year-olds fail to make these cross-exposure inferences at all. Finally, we examine an alternative avenue for sentence context to guide word learning: adults successfully use informative sentence contexts to disambiguate between previously encountered referents. Ongoing work examines this question in children. These results suggest linguistic context is most useful for forming in-the-moment hypotheses but may, in some contexts, also facilitate learning across exposures.

CogSci 2023

Examining the role of sentence context in cross-situational word learning

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Aspectual coercion occurs when there is a semantic mismatch between constituents in terms of their lexical aspect. If people fully commit to an aspectual alternative (telic or atelic), one should see the reflections of this shift in their behavior. Here we introduce a new paradigm that can reliably detect how (and whether) comprehenders process aspectual coercion to commit to an aspectual alternative as they inspect the referential world of dynamic events. In two experiments, viewers watched short movie clips and were asked to indicate whether they saw an interruption. Interruptions occurred at either the midpoint or the endpoint of the events. Telic vs. atelic sentences with and without coercion were shown prior to the movie clips. Of interest was whether processing the sentences would influence event construal and hence the detection of interruptions at midpoints vs. endpoints. Our findings reveal cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion in how comprehenders inspect the visual world of events.

Cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion

The present study examined whether acquisition of Japanese particles ga and wa is a precondition for Japanese-speaking children to pass False-Belief Task. The two particles ga and wa are different in that the former is attached to new information and the latter marks old information. Mastering appropriate use of these two particles requires the mind reading ability to understand what is known or unknown to others, hence it can be potentially related to Theory of Mind. The result of an online experiment with Japanese-speaking children aged 3 to 7 showed that children who gained higher accuracy for items about the use of wa in Sentence Repetition Task were more likely to pass False-Belief Task. This suggests that acquisition of grammatical elements expressing information status might be a prerequisite to pass False-Belief Tasks as it helps children understand other’s mind.

Is Acquisition of Japanese Particles Ga and Wa a Key to Theory of Mind Development? Evidence from Online Experiment with Sentence Repetition Task

Adults represent events through abstract roles: e.g., when Jim eats chocolate, Jim is an “Agent” and the chocolate a “Patient.” These roles are thought to be universally prominent across languages (Strickland, 2016). Nonetheless, learning to sort pictures into Agent and Patient categories is difficult for some individuals (Rissman & Lupyan, 2022). Which contexts affect the accessibility of these roles to explicit reasoning? Across two pre-registered experiments, English-speaking adults viewed pictures of an Agent acting on a Patient (e.g., one person kicking another). In each picture, a red dot marked either the Agent or the Patient. In one condition, participants freely sorted the pictures into two categories. In another condition, the pictures were accompanied by a nonsense verb marked with the suffix -ja or -ka. In both experiments, participants in the language condition were significantly more likely to sort by the Agent/Patient distinction, suggesting that language makes abstract roles more accessible.

Accessibility of Agent and Patient roles is shaped by context

Scalar words such as 'warm' often give rise to inferences such as 'warm but not hot'. Research has shown that weak scalars ('warm') prime stronger ones ('hot'), suggesting that the latter are used in implicature processing (Ronai & Xiang, 2023). We examine whether priming holds when no implicature is expected to arise. Under standard accounts, scalar implicatures are derived by negating stronger alternatives. We first tested sentences with negation and asked whether 'hot' is primed when comprehenders are exposed to 'not warm'. Then we tested antonyms, such as 'cold', which are assumed to be on a separate scale. In line with theoretical accounts (Horn, 1972), negated weak scalars did not prime strong ones. Contrary to these accounts, antonyms primed the target words. We explain these findings within the Alternative Activation Account (Gotzner, 2017) that assumes initial activation of alternatives and their subsequent contextual narrowing.

Which alternatives are relevant in scalar implicature processing? A priming study with antonyms and negation

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively and to contribute relevant and informative utterances. Often however, speakers produce trivial utterances which may violate our expectations of informativity which can prompt listeners to infer about a speaker’s goals for producing such an utterance. The present work investigates how and when listeners derive informativity-based inferences and demonstrates that speaker knowledge plays an important role in the computation of inferences. Furthermore the data shows that these inferences do not always arise automatically and their computation is costly.

Availability and Timing of Informativity Inferences

Intransitive verbs in human language can be subcategorized into at least two linguistic categories, unaccusative and unergative verbs. The definitive factor of this categorization is argued to be the meaning of the verb, while the Constructional approach suggests the sentence a verb appears in plays a role in categorization. In this study, we develop a word2vec model which leverages the context in which a verb appears in to represent the semantics of verbs and this basis of distributional semantics serves as a method to examine the Constructional approach. Our results suggest categories of Unaccusativity of new verbs can be formed on the basis of the contexts in which verbs appear, and the frequency of verbs in certain contexts can be a significant factor. We administered a child acquisition experiment to further demonstrate that, given the meaning of a new verb, sentences in which new verbs appear do significantly affect the categorization of Unaccusativity of new verbs. We conclude that, in addition to the meaning of intransitive verbs, the contextual environment is indeed a crucial factor in Mandarin Unaccusativity.

The categorization of intransitive verbs in Mandarin: Evidence from word2vec modeling and behavioral experiment

A recent proposal argued a structure like X1’s-X2 is recursive if X1 and X2 are substitutable as the head; the head requirement avoids wrong generalizations like ‘*dogs chase cats chase rats’ since NP is not the head of NP1-V-NP2 although the NPs can be substitutable. To test the role of headedness in the distributional learning of recursion, we exposed 50 adults to one of two artificial languages: both allowed A1-B-A2 strings, with A1 and A2 substitutable; but the head was A2 in one language and B in the other. Non-head elements were optional, so the two languages allowed different linear strings. In the rating test, at predicted, participants from both conditions learned the head; and while there was no difference for ABA strings between conditions, suggesting they all learned linear substitutability, participants exposed to head substitutability (A-head) were more willing to allow recursion (ABABA) with both attested and unattested words.

Distributional learning of recursive structures: The role of the structural representation

The development of large language models (LLMs) enables the investigation of cognitive phenomena at an unprecedented scale. We applied LLM-derived measures on large narrative datasets to characterize the structure and dynamics of memory retrieval. Specifically, we found that autobiographical narratives flow less linearly from sentence to sentence than biographical narratives. Furthermore, the treatment of topics within biographies tends to be more coherent and are also written at a higher level of complexity than autobiographies. In summary, the narrative flow differences suggest that when authors rely on their own memory, retrieval proceeds in a less organized manner likely reflecting spontaneous cueing of associated memories. Our results demonstrate the utility of applying LLMs to narrative text to study cognitive phenomena.

Narrative flow quantification of autobiographies reveals signatures of memory retrieval

When choosing how to describe what happened, we have a number of causal verbs at our disposal. In this paper, we develop a model-theoretic formal semantics for nine causal verbs that span the categories of CAUSE, ENABLE, and PREVENT. Our model uses structural causal models (SCMs) to represent participants' mental construction of a scene when assessing the correctness of causal expressions within the presented context. Furthermore, SCMs enable us to model events relating both the physical world as well as agents' mental states. In experimental evaluations, we find that the proposed semantics exhibits a closer alignment with human evaluations in comparison to prior accounts of the verb families.

A Semantics for Causing, Enabling, and Preventing Verbs Grounded in Structural Causal Models

We present a computational (LSTM) model that learns to produce English (3sg and -bare) verb inflection when trained on English child-directed speech (CDS). The model is trained on input containing morphemized verbs and learns to predict the next word given a preceding sequence of words. The model produces the type of error (-bare for -3s) shown by English-learning children while avoiding errors that children do not often make (-3s for -bare). The model also shows the same type of sensitivity to input statistics that has been reported in English-learning children. Finally, we manipulated the length of the sequences the model is trained on, and show that this results in the delayed acquisition of -3sg forms that is characteristic of English-learning children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Taken together these results suggest that input-driven learning is a major determinant of both typical and impaired acquisition of English verb inflection.

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Examining the role of sentence context in cross-situational word learning

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