Netherlands

Action descriptions can include or omit various types of information. In this paper, we are interested in the inclusion of manner in verbs. We use the notion of descriptive verbs, first introduced by Snell-Hornby (1983), and hypothesise that the use of descriptive verbs is reliant on having enough context to determine if the descriptive verb is correct and preferred as opposed to a more general non-descriptive verb. We conduct two online experiments in which participants are asked to indicate their preference for a verb after seeing varying amounts of textual and visual context. Our results show that textual context does not contribute to verb choice. However, we find evidence that videos contain information which creates agreement between participants, suggesting there are objective reasons to choose a descriptive or non-descriptive verb.

**Authors:**

Radina Dobreva: University of Edinburgh; Frank Keller: University of Edinburgh; Alexandra Birch: University of Edinburgh

CogSci 2024

Effects of Context on the Use of Descriptive Verbs

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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

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**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
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1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


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#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
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**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Language comprehension represents a relative strength for individuals with Down syndrome (DS), particularly in vocabulary as opposed to syntax, yet difficulties have been highlighted in areas of pragmatics. Despite issues with recall, studies investigating storytelling report sensitivity to the causal structures of narratives, while poor inferencing skills may be associated with cognitive and expressive deficits. This study investigated inferential abilities in 26 English-speaking adolescents and adults with DS and 24 vocabulary-matched typical controls. Inferencing abilities were assessed through the LITMUS MAIN comprehension task, which targeted understanding of characters’ goals and internal states. Poorer general comprehension scores we observed in DS. This suggests that individuals with DS show deficits in understanding, and potentially expressing inferential information relating to characters mental states. Age, executive functioning and grammar comprehension did not show a significant contribution to comprehension. We consider the role of matching and discuss potential implications for future research

**Authors:**

Elisa Mattiauda: University College London (UCL); Onur Özsoy: Leibniz-Center General Linguistics; Natalia Gagarina: ZAS; Alexandra Perovic: University College London

Inferential abilities in Down syndrome: Examining verbal and nonverbal contributors to narrative comprehension in adolescents and adults

Languages differ in what meanings their lexical items encode: The meaning covered by English 'blue' is famously split into 'sinij' (darkblue) and 'goluboj' (lightblue) in Russian. Recent years have seen novel interest in functional explanations of such variation, pointing to a correlation between greater communicative need of a lexical field and a finer-grained lexical inventory. Here, I develop the position that rather than the mere difference in “need” to mention lexical field, it is the field’s discourse-pragmatic diversity that predicts whether languages “lump” or “split” more. I will demonstrate this with computational techniques and a typologically diverse corpus of spontaneous spoken data from 51 languages (DoReCo), first for the field of verbs of visual perception ('see'-'look'), then on a lexicon-wide level. There are implications: our notions of what a comparable concept is in lexical semantics, what lexical knowledge entails, and the dimensions along which languages differ require re-examining.

**Authors:**

Barend Beekhuizen: University of Toronto

Lexicons encode differently what people do differently. Computational studies of the pragmatic motivations of lexical typology.

Languages vary in the ways they package the conceptual components of motion events into verbs. In a series of experiments, we examined the use of event-general conceptual categories of MANNER and RESULT during verb learning. We tested the accessibility of these concepts within and across domains of spontaneous motion and caused motion events, in speakers of typologically different languages (English and Spanish). Our results indicate that learners can adapt new lexicalization biases that may differ from those present in their own native language, and generalize them to novel instances of the same class of verbs. Furthermore, our data also indicate that under certain contexts, learners can transfer these newly learned biases to a different event domain, suggesting that event-general conceptual categories are psychologically available to learners.

**Authors:**

Sarah Hye-yeon Lee: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

Event-General Conceptual Categories Organize Verb Semantics and Acquisition Cross-linguistically

Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction. More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.

**Authors:**

Esam Ghaleb: University of Amsterdam; Marlou Rasenberg: Meertens Institute; Wim Pouw: Radboud University; Ivan Toni: Radboud University; Judith Holler: Radboud University; Asli Ozyurek: Radboud University; Raquel Fernandez: University of Amsterdam

Analysing Cross-Speaker Convergence through the Lens of Automatically Detected Shared Linguistic Constructions

When we communicate with others, we often repeat aspects of each other’s communicative behavior such as sentence structures and words. Such behavioral alignment has been mostly studied for speech or text. Yet, language use is mostly multimodal, flexibly using speech and gestures to convey messages. Here, we explore the use of alignment in speech (words) and co-speech gestures (iconic gestures) in a referential communication task aimed at finding labels for novel objects in interaction. In particular, we investigate how people flexibly use lexical and gestural alignment to create shared labels for novel objects and whether alignment in speech and gesture are related over time. The present study shows that interlocutors not only establish shared labels multimodally but also keep aligning in words and iconic gestures over the interaction. We also show that the amount of lexical alignment positively correlates with the amount of gestural alignment over time, suggesting a close relationship between alignment in the vocal and manual modalities.

**Authors:**

Sho Akamine: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Esam Ghaleb: University of Amsterdam; Marlou Rasenberg: Meertens Institute; Raquel Fernandez: University of Amsterdam; Antje Meyer: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Asli Özyürek: Max Planck Institute

Speakers align both their gestures and words not only to establish but also to maintain reference to create shared labels for novel objects in interaction

Sentences that consist of multiple clauses generally contain one clause that carries the main (at-issue) point, and other clauses whose content is more peripheral (not-at-issue). Which clause carries the at-issue point is expected to be influenced by whether a clause is at the Right Frontier: Last-uttered clauses or clauses that subordinates the last-uttered clause are expected to be a possible host for at-issue content. We report the results of a Dutch forced-choice experiment in which we measured the rate at which comprehenders interpreted an ambiguous pronoun to refer to one of two possible antecedents. We manipulated the type of clause in which each antecedent appeared (matrix vs.~subordinate) and the position of the clauses (sentence-early vs.~sentence-final). We find that independent of position, matrix clauses were more often interpreted as at-issue than ARCs, but that clauses in sentence-final position were more often interpreted as at-issue than clauses in sentence-early position.

**Authors:**

Hans Wilke: University of Groningen; Jet Hoek: Radboud University

At-issueness and the Right Frontier: An Investigation of Dutch

Gricean maxims prescribe cooperative speakers to make their utterances maximally informative so that listeners have the highest chance of understanding the utterances as intended. At the same time, speakers are expected to save articulatory effort and not produce descriptions that are more explicit than necessary. In this work, we first ask how predictability of the described events affects the choice of anaphoric references. We show that speakers prefer phonologically overt descriptions, such as definite NPs, when they refer to agents that behave in an unexpected way. We further test how the interpretation of references changes depending on the listening conditions (low vs.~high noise) and prior expectations about the plausibility of an event. Our work shows that the speaker's extra effort in choosing a more phonologically overt reference is justified by listeners' behavior: they report having heard an utterance which is more plausible than the originally spoken utterance and which contains additional phonological material.

**Authors:**

Asya Achimova: University of Tübingen; Marjolein van Os: Saarland University; Vera Demberg: Saarland University; Martin V. Butz: University of Tuebingen

Interpreting implausible event descriptions under noise

The default null hypothesis in typical statistical modelling software is that a parameter's value is equal to zero. However, this may not always correspond to the actual conditions that would hold if the effect of interest did not exist. In two case studies based on recent research in cognitive science and linguistics, we illustrate how data simulation can shed light on unspoken, sometimes even incorrect, assumptions about what the null hypothesis is. In particular, we consider two experiment-specific measures of changes in probability distributions where the null condition is not always equal to zero change; and an investigation of a cognitive bias for skewed distributions based on the assumption that, without such a bias, distributions would always remain uniform. All in all, simulating null conditions not only improves each researcher's understanding of their own analysis and results, but also contributes to the practice of "open theory". Formalising one's assumptions is, in itself, an important contribution to the scientific community.

**Authors:**

Aislinn Keogh: University of Edinburgh; Elizabeth Pankratz: University of Edinburgh

Simulation as a tool for formalising null hypotheses in cognitive science research

Natural languages show a tendency to minimize the linear distance between heads and their dependents in a sentence, known as dependency length minimization (DLM). Such a preference, however, has not been consistently replicated with neural agent simulations. Comparing the behavior of models with that of human learners can reveal which aspects affect the emergence of this phenomenon. In this work, we investigate the minimal conditions that may lead neural learners to develop a DLM preference. We add three factors to the standard neural-agent language learning and communication framework to make the simulation more realistic, namely: (i) the presence of noise during listening, (ii) context-sensitivity of word use through non-uniform conditional word distributions, and (iii) incremental sentence processing. While no preference appears in production, we show that the proposed factors contribute to a small but consistent learning advantage of DLM for listeners of verb-initial languages.

**Authors:**

Yuqing Zhang: University of Groningen; Tessa Verhoef: Leiden University; Gertjan van Noord: University of Groningen; Arianna Bisazza: University of Groningen

Neural-agent Language Learning and Communication: Emergence of Dependency Length Minimization

How children acquire the rules governing past tense production has been for many years a test bed case for nativist-constructivist debates about the nature of innate knowledge and its role in language acquisition. However, previous studies have tested the acquisition of past tense via corpus analysis, in which errors are rare, or elicitation tasks, in which tested items are few, resulting in limited between-item variability. To address these weaknesses, we analysed data from a uniquely large and longitudinal dataset containing 694 verbs, collected via an educational online platform. We examined whether form-frequency, phonological neighbourhood density (PND), and telicity predict the verb-level difficulty of past tense forms in Dutch. Our sample consists of Dutch-speaking children aged 8-12 years old, the age at which children are still making past tense over-regularisation errors. Analyses are ongoing but preliminary results suggest a role for all three factors and an interaction between frequency and PND.

**Authors:**

Eleni Zimianiti: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Lilian Ye: Prowise Learn; Abe Hofman: University of Amsterdam; Rogier A Kievit: donders; Caroline F Rowland: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Seamus Donnelly: Australian National University

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