United States

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.

CogSci 2023

Lexical diversity across monolingual and multilingual populations

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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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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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.

Chinese words shorten in more predictive contexts

A long tradition of studies in psycholinguistics has examined the formation and generalization of ad hoc conventions in reference games, showing how newly acquired conventions for a given target transfer to new referential contexts. However, another axis of generalization remains understudied: How do conventions formed for one target transfer to completely distinct targets, when specific lexical choices are unlikely to repeat? This paper presents two dyadic studies $(N=240$) that address this axis of generalization, focusing on the role of nameability --- the a priori likelihood that two individuals will share the same label. We leverage the recently-released \kilogram dataset, a collection of abstract tangram images that is orders of magnitude larger than previously available, exhibiting high diversity of properties like nameability. Our first study asks how nameability shapes convention formation, while the second asks how new conventions generalize to entirely new targets of reference.

Semantic uncertainty guides the extension of conventions to new referents

How is it that humans can solve complex planning tasks so efficiently despite limited cognitive resources? One reason is its ability to know how to use its limited computational resources to make clever choices. 
We postulate that people learn this ability from trial and error (metacognitive reinforcement learning). Here, we systematize models of the underlying learning mechanisms and enhance them with more sophisticated additional mechanisms. We fit the resulting 86 models to human data collected in previous experiments where different phenomena of metacognitive learning were demonstrated and performed Bayesian model selection. Our results suggest that a gradient ascent through the space of cognitive strategies can explain most of the observed qualitative phenomena, and is therefore a promising candidate for explaining the mechanism underlying metacognitive learning.

What are the mechanisms underlying metacognitive learning?

Whether timing affects contingency learning is currently poorly understood. Specifically, does temporal predictability aid the acquisition of contingencies? We asked participants in a music contingency learning task to respond to the target (the name of a note) while ignoring tones. To assess whether temporal predictability influences the acquisition of these contingencies, we manipulated the temporal context of tone presentation in two experiments. In Experiment 1, one group of participants listened to tones presented with a regular temporal interval (1000 ms between each trial), while the other group listened to tones presented in a random manner (random intervals selected between 600 and 1400 ms). In Experiment 2 we manipulated the temporal presentation of the tones within trials: one group listened to tones with a 300 ms fixed interval between the cue and the target, and the other group with an interval randomly selected between 0 and 600 ms. Although participants learned to associate pitch labels in both experiments this occurred independently of the timing manipulations. These results confirm prior evidence on contingency learning but do not show the effects of temporal predictability in this learning context.

The role of temporal predictability in contingency learning

We examined bilingual students’ test-taking strategies through an eye-tracking experiment. 71 university students with different levels of English (L2) proficiency attempted carefully selected multiple-choice and structured questions on their Biology knowledge. Their eye movement behavior was captured during the process and analyzed using both summary statistics of eye movement measures and gaze transition consistency as measured in entropy using Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) to infer their test-taking strategies, which were then correlated with test performance measured in accuracy and reaction time. Results generally showed that eye movement behavior during test taking was associated with performance. In particular, gaze transition consistency predicted performance beyond summary statistics of eye movement measures. However, language proficiency was not associated with eye movement behavior or performance. These results may imply that participants’ moment-by-moment, flexible problem-solving strategies when taking the test would better predict their performance than their underlying language proficiency.

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Lexical diversity across monolingual and multilingual populations

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

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