Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

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

poster

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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Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**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** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
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** 
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.

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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.

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

Item-level Difficulty Predictors in the Acquisition of Past Tense in Dutch

We study repair in child-directed speech (CDS) and child speech (CS) in longitudinal corpora of 4 languages: English, Russian, Chintang and Indonesian (age range 2;01-3;04). We distinguish: open requests (whole utterance unclear, 'huh?'), restricted requests (utterance partly unclear, 'you saw what yesterday?'), and restricted offers (confirmation requested, 'you saw a film?') (Dingemanse et al., 2015). 
Our results indicate that only restricted offers in CDS are significant for predicting the respective types in CS. We therefore suggest that open and restricted requests are more dependent on children's socio-cognitive development, whereas restricted offers rely more on input distributions. Restricted offers are also used by caregivers to correct or provide feedback, and this investment in language teaching differs greatly across cultures (e.g., 72.4% in Russian CDS but only 22% in Chintang). We propose that acquisition of repairs in children relies both on socio-cognitive abilities and input distributions.

**Authors:**

Liudmyla Feurstein: University of Zurich; Sabine Stoll: University of Zurich

Repair in Children’s Language Acquisition: Universal Principles and Patterns of Variation

Words that are learned early were shown to be semantically more stable, and vice versa (Cassani et al. 2021, Cognitive Science). Semantic change, however, has multiple aspects. In this diachronic corpus study, we examine the relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and a set of different measures of semantic change: change in a word’s polysemy; overall semantic displacement; and average extent of semantic fluctuation. All measures are based on diachronically layered sense distributions (Hu et al. 2019, ACL) derived from the Corpus of Historical American English. AoA is taken from Kuperman et al. (2012, Behav. Res. Meth.). Taking interactions with frequency into account, we show that semantic displacement and fluctuation are positively associated with AoA as expected. Early acquisition is associated with an increase in polysemy. This hints at the relevance of semantic (metaphorical) extension in the early acquisition of the lexicon.

**Authors:**

Andreas Baumann: University of Vienna; Andreas Scheicher: TU Wien; Irene Böhm: University of Vienna; Stefan Hartmann: HHU Düsseldorf

Aspects of semantic change and how they interact with lexical acquisition

The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct ‘good-enough’ processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task types. We employ two Korean clausal constructions (suffixal passive; morphological causative) which contrast pertaining to the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as native Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker’s capacity and willingness to conduct (algorithmic) parsing, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues.

**Authors:**

Gyu-Ho Shin: Unversity of Illinois at Chicago

‘Good-Enough’ Processing by Heritage Speakers: A Case of Korean Suffixal Passive and Morphological Causative Constructions

It has been claimed that language learners are better at acquiring phonetically motivated phonological patterns compared to unmotivated patterns; this hypothesis is known as substantively biased phonological learning. We test this hypothesis by exposing French-speaking participants (n=75) to either a vowel harmony pattern (phonetically motivated) or a vowel disharmony pattern (comparable formal complexity but phonetically unmotivated) in an artificial language. Participants were trained with noun roots and a single suffix, but at test were required to add multiple suffixes to roots, including a novel suffix with a vowel unobserved during training. Although participants performed equally well when adding a single suffix, only those in the harmony condition generalized when adding two suffixes (including the held-out suffix). This work expands on previous research by showing feature-based generalization of harmony, but not disharmony, to novel affixes held out from training. It provides strong evidence for the substantively biased phonological learning account.

**Authors:**

Alexander Martin: University of Groningen; James White: University College London

Feature-based generalisation in sound pattern learning depends on phonetic motivation

Generalizations that hold across all languages (linguistic universals) provide important insights into cognition, language, and learning. In semantics, the best-known universal is determiner conservativity: the truth of sentences like “every/most/some/no fish swim(s)” depends only on the determiner’s first argument (“fish”). This rules out cross-linguistically unattested determiners (e.g., “equi fish swims” meaning ‘the fish and the swimmers are numerically equivalent’ isn’t conservative because both fish and swimmers matter). Zuber & Keenan (2019) propose a weakening of conservativity: determiners depend on their first OR second argument, but not both. Which constraint do learners obey? We test whether adults are able to learn novel determiners that are classically non-conservative but are conservative on the weakened view. We compare these ‘weakly conservative’ cases against novel determiners that are conservative on both views and non-conservative on both views. We find that adults can learn conservative meanings, but not weakly conservative meanings, supporting the classical understanding.

**Authors:**

Tyler Knowlton: University of Pennsylvania; John Trueswell: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

The strength of a universal

Languages vary in the way they typically order subject, verb, and object in transitive sentences. Although all six possible word orders are attested, there is enormous variability the frequency with which they occur in the languages of the world. Here, we investigate whether this variability is reflected in differences in the learnability of the possible word orders. Thus, we carried out a language learning experiment in which native English speakers had to learn artificial languages with different word orders. The results suggest that there is broad correspondence between the typological frequency of different word orders and their learnability, which supports the hypothesis that there are cognitive and/or communicative factors that are responsible for the bias in the distribution of word orders. We further analyse the data using a novel Bayesian learning model for simultaneous vocabulary and word order acquisition.

**Authors:**

Bob van Tiel: Radboud University Nijmegen; Fausto Carcassi: University of Amsterdam; Xiaochen Y Zheng: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

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