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Is there a cognitive bias against absolute synonymy? The current work explored this question via a miniature mini-artificial language experiment featuring iterated learning, which can amplify weak cognitive biases, as languages are sifted through multiple adult learners. Participants were taught two novel synonymous verbs in positive or negative sentences. Afterwards, they had to generalize the words to new positive or
negative sentences. These sentences then served as the input sentences for the next participant in the diffusion chain and so on. Despite inconsistent input with regard to positive or negative meaning, participants differentiated the verbs. More than half of participants strongly differentiated them, specializing at least one term. However, transmission did not increase differentiation overall, suggesting that a bias against synonymy may encourage a minimally distinctive difference, not necessarily a systematic one, between synonyms.

CogSci 2023

A Weak Bias Against Strong Synonymy?

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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).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
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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.

Consider the following two (hypothetical) generic causal claims: “Attending an all-girls school improves girls’ math scores” and “attending an affluent all-girls school improves girls’ math scores.” These claims not only differ in what they suggest about how test scores are distributed across different types of schools (i.e., “the data”), but also have the potential to communicate something about the speakers’ values: namely, the prominence they accord to affluence in representing and making decisions about the social world. Here, we examine the relationship between the level of granularity with which a cause is described in a generic causal claim (e.g., all-girls school vs. affluent all-girls school) and the value of the information contained in the causal model that generates that claim. We argue that listeners who know any two of the following can make reliable inferences about the third: 1) the level of granularity at which a speaker makes a generic causal claim, 2) the speaker’s decision-theoretic values, and 3) the data available to the speaker. We present results of three experiments in the domain of social categories (N=853) that provide evidence in keeping with these predictions.

Tell Me Your (Cognitive) Budget, and I’ll Tell You What You Value: Evidential Relationships Between Values, Data, and Generic Causal Claims about the Social World

Positive emotional responses triggered by pleasant experiences can aid memorization ability in humans. However, little is known about the effect of aesthetically pleasing experiences on linguistic memory. To experimentally investigate whether aesthetic appeal promotes word memorability, study participants rated a set of artificial words on their aesthetic appeal and were asked to actively memorize them. In line with the predictions, higher-rated words were significantly likelier to be recollected and, interestingly, tended to contain similar patterns of phonemes. This suggests that phonemes contain an inherent aesthetic value and that linguistic memorization is aided by the presence of such aesthetically appealing sound patterns. This encourages further exploration of the effect of aesthetic perception on linguistic processing and allows for more objective approaches to assessing languages’ general appeal. Additionally, the results might have implications for the marketing industry where they allow for more efficient marketing strategies directly affecting their audience’s memory.

The effect of aesthetic appeal on words' memorability

The present research explored the development of prediction systems in 24- and 30-month-old toddlers in a visual world paradigm. Participants heard a sentence including correction (“no”) or conjunction (“and”) while seeing an array of pictures with an associatively related noun (“cat”) and the erroneous noun (“dog”). The young group showed an early prediction of the associative picture in both types of sentences, while the older group showed an early prediction of the coordination condition, but a later prediction in the correction sentences. Our results suggest that older toddlers deployed different predictive systems, while the younger group used the same system.

Linguistic Anticipation in Children’s Correction Sentences

Lexical diversity, the proportion of unique lemmas in a text, is known to vary across first language and second language production. It has been used by researchers as a proxy for language proficiency, particularly for classroom language learners. Lexical diversity has been found to vary by language background, potentially at least partly due to cross-linguistic influence. We investigated whether or how lexical diversity differs across groups with varied language backgrounds, namely monolinguals, bilinguals, adult language learners, and post-attrition speakers. We expected that these groups would show differing mean lexical diversity scores due to their different backgrounds with varying combinations of languages and levels of proficiency. Data from 114 participants were stratified and showed substantial between-group overlap in their lexical diversity scores. However, some significant by-group differences in lexical diversity were found. We discuss the implications of these results.

Lexical diversity across monolingual and multilingual populations

Speech pauses between conversational turns are crucial for assessing conversation partners’ cognitive states, such as their willingness to grant requests: Overall, speakers making longer pauses are regarded as less willing to comply with requests. We experimentally tested if the interpretation of pause length was mediated by the accent of interactants, in particular native versus non-native accents. In line with our prediction, in a rating task, participants judged non-native speakers to be equally willing to grant requests, irrespective of their inter-turn pause durations, whereas native speakers making long pauses were regarded as less willing than those making short pauses. This indicates that listeners interpret long pauses by non-native speakers as the result of prolonged cognitive processing needed for planning an answer in a non-native language rather than of a lack of willingness. This may have important implications for intercultural communication settings where topics are negotiated between native and non-native speakers.

Speech pause length predicts the attribution of willingness to help in native and non-native speakers

The principle of dependency length minimization, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which dependency length minimization is applied in human language systems is not yet fully understood. Preverbally, the placement of long-before-short constituents and postverbally, short-before-long constituents are known to minimize overall dependency length of a sentence. In this study, we test the hypothesis that placing only the shortest preverbal constituent next to the main-verb explains word order preferences in Hindi (a SOV language) as opposed to the global minimization of dependency length. We characterize this approach as a least-effort strategy because it is a cost-effective way to shorten all dependencies between the verb and its preverbal dependencies. As such, this approach is consistent with the bounded-rationality perspective according to which decision making is governed by `fast but frugal’ heuristics rather than by a search for optimal solutions. Consistent with this idea, our results indicate that actual corpus sentences in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus are better explained by the least effort strategy than by global minimization of dependency lengths. Additionally, for the task of distinguishing corpus sentences from counterfactual variants, we find that the dependency length and constituent length of the constituent closest to the main verb is a much better predictor of whether a sentence appeared in the corpus than total dependency length. Overall, our work sheds light on the role of cognitive resource constraints in shaping natural languages.

A bounded rationality account of dependency length minimization in Hindi

Lexical production research has relied extensively on in- person naming experiments such as Picture Word Interference (PWI). While the interference effects observed in the standard paradigm have been well-attested, PWI experiments have tra- ditionally been underpowered, owing to limitations associated with large-scale data collection. In this study, we validate a scalable, typing time-based PWI paradigm that can be de- ployed on the internet, and enables high-powered replications of the interference effects observed in the spoken modality. We also propose an automated response coding process that in- corporates production errors such as incorrect responses and restarts, and can be leveraged to illuminate aspects of response conflict and correction processes in incremental production.

Typing time PWI: A scalable paradigm for studying lexical production

When two arguments of a sentence vary in length, speakers of SOV languages prefer to place the longer argument before the shorter one leading to a long-before-short word order. The functional motivation behind such an ordering choice has been provided by two opposing accounts. According to the first account, long-before-short order makes production efficient by keeping syntactic heads and dependents close to each other (dependency locality). The alternate account argues that long-before-short order is a product of increased conceptual accessibility of long arguments during production. In this work, we test the predictions made by the two accounts by comparing ordering choices in Hindi transitive sentences containing object modifying post-nominal relative clauses (RCs). Results reveal that it is efficiency and not accessibility that determines word order during production. These findings add to the body of work that argues for an overarching influence of working memory constraints on both comprehension and production.

Dependency Locality Influences Word Order During Production in SOV Languages: Evidence from Hindi

Lexical entrainment is a phenomenon in which people tend to re-use the words used by conversational partners (Brennan & Clark, 1996). It is explained as either an automatic reaction caused by priming (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), or a strategic behavior where two interlocutors achieve conceptual agreements for communicative purposes (Brennan & Clark, 1996). Past studies suggest that speakers tend to entrain more when interacting with listeners with lower language competence, such as computers (Branigan, Pickering, Pearson, McLean, & Brown, 2011), children (Cai, Sun, & Zhao, 2021), and non-native partners (Cai et al., 2021; Suffill, Kutasi, Pickering, & Branigan, 2021). However, few studies have explored how the features of speakers themselves determine the pattern of entrainment, and the studies that do exist suggest that speaker proficiency (as opposed to listener proficiency) may not affect entrainment behavior. In this study, we target bilingual groups and explore individual differences in lexical entrainment by looking at their entrainment behavior with picture matching and naming tasks. Over the course of two experiments, we investigate English entrainment in English-speaking bilinguals, as well as Mandarin entrainment in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Unlike the previous literature, our results suggest that a speaker’s language dominance/proficiency may have an effect on that speaker’s entrainment: bilinguals who are less dominant/proficient in English tend to entrain more in English, although the effect in Mandarin did not reach significance.

Lexical Entrainment in Bilingual Language Use

In Mandarin Chinese, abbreviation happens commonly to compound words across different syntactic categories. What is the motivation behind this shortening of words? This paper presents an investigation of this phenomenon from an information-theoretic point of view. A corpus study was con- ducted to measure the average amount of information contained in the full (long) form and the abbreviated (short) form of words given certain contexts. The amount of information was then compared between the long and short forms of a word, revealing that the short one usually contains less information, and therefore is more likely to be used in more predictive contexts. This result indicates that speakers of Chinese can choose to use shorter words when the context is more predictive, in accordance with considerations of efficiency.

Next from CogSci 2023

Tell Me Your (Cognitive) Budget, and I’ll Tell You What You Value: Evidential Relationships Between Values, Data, and Generic Causal Claims about the Social World

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