Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

Aspects of semantic change and how they interact with lexical acquisition

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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.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
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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** 
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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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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

Word order and the learnability of artificial languages

The present study focuses on Complementizer Omission in Russian. The choice of alternating pairs is statistically modeled with mixed-effects regression. We find that the complementizer is more likely to be absent when the matrix subject is a first or second person pronoun, the matrix predicate has a high frequency and the onset of the complement clause is unsurprising, non-ambiguous and non-informational. On the one hand, the findings align well with the Grammaticalization theory. On the other hand, the findings offer no strong support for any of the three accounts of language processing (Availability-based Production, Ambiguity Avoidance and Uniform Information Density). We argue that Complementizer Omission may be an important locus of language differentiation and that previous accounts from the perspective of language processing may not be universal. We propose that more cross-linguistic re-search should be done on syntactic alternations as "even similar constructions may be processed differently in different languages".

**Authors:**

Yue Zou: Shanghai International Studies University; Hao Lin: Shanghai International Studies University

The optionality of complementizer čto in Russian — a multifactorial analysis

Results from both cross-language priming and code-switching studies suggest that syntax is shared between languages in a bilingual’s language system. However, it is not clear how these bilingual language phenomena interact. We tested whether, under an implicit learning account, code-switching in the prime increases syntax sharing, leading to stronger cross-language priming. We conducted four simulated Spanish to English structural priming experiments using the Bilingual Dual-path model. The primes either had an English (code-switched) determiner and noun or noun only, at the beginning or end of the sentence, or were entirely in Spanish. Mixed effects analyses only revealed a significant positive interaction between code-switch condition and priming, indicating stronger priming, with a code-switched English noun phrase at the very beginning of the sentence, but non-significant interactions otherwise. These results provide further support for the idea that code-switching and cross-language structural priming can be interpreted as evidence for shared syntactic representations bilinguals.

**Authors:**

Yung Han Khoe: Radboud University; Gerrit Jan Kootstra: Radboud University; Edith Kaan: University of Florida; Rob Schoonen: Radboud University; Stefan Frank: Radboud University

Shared syntax in bilinguals: Does code-switching affect the strength of cross-language structural priming?

We explore (1) how speakers employ prosodic and gestural cues to deal with ambiguous sentences and (2) what the audiovisual resolution reveals about communicative efficiency and effort. Thirty-two Chinese speakers articulated twenty-two ambiguous Mandarin sentences. Half could be semantically differentiated using prosody (half couldn’t). First, participants spontaneously articulated all sentences and explained the meaning to a confederate, revealing their dominant interpretations. Second, participants articulated the same ambiguous sentences twice according to hints suggesting two different meanings. Analyses of participants’ prosody and gestures showed that for sentences that can be prosodically distinguished, participants employed various prosodic cues, while 51.85% of sentences were accompanied by referential (iconic; pointing) gestures and 17.33% of sentences were accompanied by non-referential (beat; interactional) gestures. However, when prosodic cues cannot disambiguate, participants used more referential (97.30%) but fewer non-referential gestures (1.28%). In conclusion, speakers adopt a multimodal approach to achieve communicative efficiency with a trade-off between modalities.

**Authors:**

Jiajun GAO: University of Nottingham Ningbo China; Yan Gu: University of Essex

Same Same but Different: How Ambiguity is Resolved by Prosody and Gestures

Variation in the use of syntactic alternations has long been an explanatory target of language production theories. In this work, we test the predictions of several semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic theories of language use for the English dative alternation. We first experimentally test the role of incremental constituent informativity in the dative alternation, and find that contrary to information structural and RSA models of production, informativity has little effect on production preferences. We then more rigorously focus on accessibility effects, demonstrating that a lossy-context automatic policy can recover a key pattern of accessibility. Ultimately, we conclude that incremental production is modulated primarily by both accessibility and lexical semantic effects, rather than audience design pressures.

**Authors:**

Neil Rathi: Stanford University; Brandon Waldon: Georgetown University; Judith Degen: Stanford University

Informativity and accessibility in incremental production of the dative alternation

Human linguistic communication is based on a variety of inferences that we draw from sentences, often going beyond what is literally said. While there is wide agreement on the basic distinction between entailments, implicatures, and presuppositions, their boundaries are continuously being re-drawn and the status of many inferences remains open. In this paper, we focus on three inferences of plain and embedded disjunctions, and compare them with regular implicatures. We investigate this comparison from the novel perspective of the predictions of state-of-the-art Large Language Models, using the same experimental
paradigms as recent studies investigating the same inferences with humans. The results of our best performing models mostly align with those of humans, both in the large differences we find between those inferences and regular implicatures, as well as in fine-grained distinctions among different aspects of those inferences.

**Authors:**

Polina Tsvilodub: University of Tübingen; Paul Marty: University of Malta; Sonia Ramotowska: University of Amsterdam; Jacopo Romoli: Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf; Michael Franke: University of Tübingen

Experimental Pragmatics with Machines: Testing LLM Predictions for the Inferences of Plain and Embedded Disjunctions

Recognizing printed words involves identifying individual letters, as well as keeping track of specific positions of the letters. Interestingly, some languages show flexibility in letter-position coding which is inferred by the observation that pseudowords formed by transposing internal letters of a word (e.g., jugde-JUDGE) can facilitate recognition of the given word. While research in English and other Indo-European languages have shown that readers can cope with such violations in the canonical order of letters in a word, research from other languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Korean produce contrary findings. Such scenario creates a demand for conducting similar research across different languages using different writing systems, so that a universal model of word-recognition can be built. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated flexibility in letter-position coding in Hindi (Devanagari script). Interestingly, we find evidence for flexibility in letter position encoding in Hindi similar to English and other Indo-European languages.

**Authors:**

Suraj Kumar: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur; Anurag Khare: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur; Ark Verma: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

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

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