Netherlands

Phonological assimilation is cross-linguistically widespread, but languages differ in their type(s) of assimilation. We investigate optional assimilation in bilingual speakers to examine whether they show transfer from their L1. Specifically, we ask whether they apply their native assimilation rule and/or fail to apply the L2 assimilation rule in their L2 speech. Using a French reading task, we examined the amount of French voicing assimilation and English-like place assimilation in the productions of both early and advanced late English-French bilinguals. Using a speech recognizer with specific pronunciation variants, we found that the late bilinguals showed evidence for transfer of place assimilation, as well as a reduction in the amount of voicing assimilation compared to that of native French controls. The early bilinguals did not differ from the French controls in terms of place assimilation, but their voicing assimilation rate was intermediate between those of the French controls and the late bilinguals.

**Authors:**

Sharon Peperkamp: Ecole Normale Supérieure - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; Sonya Kaiser: Ecole Normale Supérieure - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; Lori Lamel: CNRS-LISN; Martine ADDA-DECKER: CNRS

CogSci 2024

Cross-linguistic transfer of phonological assimilation in early and late bilinguals

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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1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
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**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) 
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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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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 
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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

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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.

poster

This study examines the general claim that bilingualism, leads to a facilitatory effect on cognitive control. Repeatedly resolving conflict between simultaneously active representations is thought to spill over into other domains involving conflict resolution. Recent literature indicates that the effects of bilingualism on executive functions need examination with a more comprehensive characterization of bilingualism and the use of multiple measures of executive control (Backer & Bortfeld, 2021; K. R. Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Here, we operationalize bilingualism using a set of continuous variables related to language knowledge and use. Next, we employ Bayesian regression analyses to assess the evidence for the null, i.e. the lack of an effect of bilingualism. We aimed to be able to respond to current arguments in favor of an advantage that appeal to the measurement of bilingualism, its task-specificity and the methodological issues that exist with widely used tasks such as the Simon, Stroop or Flanker (K. R. Paap, Anders-Jefferson, Zimiga, Mason, & Mikulinsky, 2020).In this study, we assess the effects of bilingualism under a newly specified mechanism of attentional control (Bialystok & Craik, 2022), specifically in sustained attention. We also administer new tasks, developed to be psychometrically sound and an improvement to existing measures of attentional control by (Draheim, Tsukahara, Martin, Mashburn, & Engle, 2021). Two sustained attention tasks, along with two versions of the Flanker task were administered. The null model was the best model (with the greatest posterior probability) for all tasks. Bilingualism-related characteristics failed to show reliable influence for both sustained attention tasks. Even for ”improved measures” less susceptible to methodological flaws related to RT impurity and processing confounds, the best model was the null model. The results imply that the source of null effects is not the inadequate choice of inhibition as an explanatory mechanism. We conclude that bilingualism does not have coherent and consistent effects on cognitive control (specified as either inhibition or sustained attention) and the lack of an effect is not specific to the type of conflict involved in a task or its reliance on reaction times.

**Authors:**

Moulshree Rana: Radboud University; Ark Verma: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Effects of Bilingualism on Sustained Attention and Inhibition: A Bayesian Enquiry

The semantic representation of abstract words is a topic of discussion within the embodied cognition framework. Existing theories propose the involvement of emotional, linguistic, and social experiences in abstract word representation. Focusing on the socialness — a variable with limited empirical evidence — our study explores whether (some) abstract words are associated with richer social experiences. Two social semantic priming categorization tasks (explicit and implicit) and a lexical decision task were conducted to examine socialness and its interaction with concreteness. We closely mirrored these tasks by running similar experiments with emotional valence — a variable known to influence processing of abstract words. Our results show that high socialness and emotional valence both impact the recognition of abstract words in explicit tasks only. Conclusively, we find no evidence supporting a non-strategic effect of socialness and valence on abstract words recognition, challenging existing theories about their roles as grounding variables for abstract words.

**Authors:**

Daria Goriachun: Aix-Marseille University; Kristof Strijkers: CNRS & Aix-Marseille University; Nuria Gala: Aix-Marseille University; Johannes C. Ziegler: Aix-Marseille University

Investigating social grounding of abstract words

From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the recent Hollywood blockbuster Arrival, the notion of time-travel is a firmly established narrative trope. And yet tales of travel back-and-forth through time are essentially non-existent before the mid-19th century. This invites the question: How do people make sense of time-travel, and how does it build on the more basic building-blocks of our conception of time itself? Here, we investigate lay conceptions of time-travel using a gesture elicitation paradigm. Participants watched brief videos of time-travel stories and then recounted the plots. Combining qualitative analysis and machine learning extraction of co-speech gesture trajectories, we describe how participants’ construals of time-travel cobble together more basic spatial construals time (e.g., length-duration; past-left vs. future-right), combined to create layered, ad-hoc, flexible representations of time. We discuss implications for how spatial metaphor can offer a foundation for more complex, elaborated forms of reasoning and understanding.

**Authors:**

Shervin Nosrati: University of California, Merced; Leo Niehorster-Cook: University of California, Merced; Tyler Marghetis: University of California, Merced

Spatial Construals of Time... Travel

Just as we intuitively know that "chair" and "boy" denote referents in different categories, we know that "standing" falls into a different category from "walking": One of the events is static, the other dynamic. In three self-paced reading experiments, we show that such differences in event dynamicity leads to expectations about the temporal structure of complex events. We replicate and extend Gennari (2004): Participants read complement (Exp.1) and relative clause constructions (Exp.2,3) in which the event type in the subordinate clause (i.e., event/state) and temporal proximity between main and subordinate clause situations (i.e., close/overlap vs. distant/non-overlap) were manipulated. Consistent with Gennari (2004), we find evidence that people expect states to overlap (Exp.1,2), but only when in line with their expectation that states should happen first in time (Exp.3). Our results support a multifactorial model of language comprehension in which event structure is central to the formation of temporal expectations.

**Authors:**

Elena Marx: Central European University; Eva Wittenberg: Central European University

States overlap: Evidence from complement and relative clause comprehension

Children frequently use under-informative expressions (e.g., Side) while describing Left-Right relations between objects but use gestures to disambiguate the relative locations of objects (Karadöller et al., 2022). Here, we ask how children collect visual information about the spatial relations they express when planning such descriptions. Twenty Turkish-speaking 8-year-olds saw displays with four pictures of the same two objects in various spatial configurations. Target pictures described to a confederate depicted left-right relations (e.g., lemon left to box). Descriptions were coded as whether they were informative in speech, informative with gesture, or under-informative. Children had more target fixations when planning (1) informative than under-informative descriptions (β=0.515, SE=0.131, p<0.001); (2) descriptions that are informative with gesture than informative in speech (β=-0.827, SE=0.171, p<0.001). Results extend previous literature showing that visual attention changes as a function of informativeness and the modality (Ünal et al., 2022) of the description for 8-year-old children.

**Authors:**

Dilay Z. Karadoller: Middle East Technical University; Asli Ozyurek: Donders Institute ; Ercenur Ünal: Özyeğin University

Children’s visual attention when planning informative multimodal descriptions of object locations

In the remote triad task, participants judge the relatedness between randomly chosen words in a three-alternative choice triadic judgement task. While most word pairs in these triads are weakly related, humans agree on which to choose. This is theoretically interesting as it contradicts previous claims that suggest that the notion of similarity is unconstrained in principle (e.g., Goodman,1972). Here, we present new evidence from GPT-4, showing that context-aware LLMs provide excellent predictions of this task. Moreover, the strength of this effect was even larger than that found for basic-level comparisons, which involve highly similar items. Together, this implies that the similarity of human representations is highly structured at every scale, even in tasks with limited context. Follow-up analysis provides insights into how LLMs are successful in this task. Further implications of the ability to compare words at every scale are discussed.

**Authors:**

Simon De Deyne: University of Melbourne

Evaluating human-like similarity biases at every scale in Large Language Models: Evidence from remote and basic-level triads.

Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with {Object-before-Subject} (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with {Subject-before-Object} (SOV) order. Although this difficulty diminishes with appropriate discourse context, the underlying cognitive factors responsible for alleviating processing challenges in OSV sentences remain a question. In this work, we test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of non-canonical (OSV) syntactic choices, especially when controlling for information status such as givenness and surprisal measures. We extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB) that contain clearly-defined subjects and objects, systematically permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and deploy a classifier to discern original corpus sentences from artificially generated alternatives. The classifier leverages various discourse-based and cognitive features, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status, to inform its predictions. Our results suggest that, although there exists a predilection for minimizing dependency length in non-canonical corpus sentences amidst the generated variants, this factor does not significantly contribute in predicting corpus sentence above and beyond surprisal and givenness measures. Notably, the discourse predictability emerges as the primary determinant of constituent-order preferences. These findings are further supported by human evaluations involving 44 native Hindi speakers. Overall, this work sheds light on the role of expectation adaptation in word-ordering decisions. We conclude by situating our results within the theories of discourse production and information locality.

**Authors:**

Sidharth Ranjan: University of Stuttgart; Marten van Schijndel: Cornell University

Does Dependency Locality Predict Non-canonical Word Order in Hindi?

This study addressed the role of numeral interpretation for risky-choice and attribute framing effects by investigating the effects of three numeral modifiers. In Experiment 1, in which the numerals were modified with (the German equivalent of) exactly to enforce a precise reading, there were significant framing effects. Experiment 2 (risky-choice framing) and Experiment 3 (attribute framing) addressed the effects of (the German equivalents of) at most and up to. Both modifiers set an upper bound. Yet, they exhibit a sharp contrast in evaluative contexts. In Experiment 2, there was a significant interaction of modifier and frame, with a reversed framing effect for at most and a standard framing effect for up to. The modifier-by-frame interaction effect was replicated in Experiment 3 for attribute framing. These findings are difficult to reconcile with extant accounts of framing effects and are especially challenging for accounts according to which framing effects result from lower-bound readings of bare numerals. The findings can be captured in a semantic-pragmatic valence account.

**Authors:**

Berry Claus: Leibniz University Hannover; Marie Christin Walch: Leibniz Universität Hannover

Numeral Modification and Framing Effects: exactly and at most vs up to

Even when early implanted, children with cochlear implants show heterogeneous language skills and often struggle with pragmatic communication aspects. Research aimed at elucidating specific weaknesses at the interactional level has yielded inconsistent findings. We analyse dyadic interactions involving nine hearing-impaired children and fourteen normal-hearing children engaging with an adult during a referential (treasure-hunting) task, periodically alternated with role-reversal sub-tasks (e.g., child-led referential-tasks, child-storytelling). Our investigation employs a multi-level analysis approach, encompassing acoustic features (F0, intensity, speech duration, speech rate), turn-taking dynamics (duration, gaps, overlaps), laughter responsiveness and pragmatic functions, convergence of these features, dialogue acts, contingency, and task success. We compare interactional patterns across groups and conditions. The adoption of a multi-level characterization is grounded in the hypothesis that alignment at "lower levels" serves a functional role and concurrently offers insights into alignment at a conceptual level, thereby facilitating mutual understanding and conversational success, giving insights on underpinning neuro-psychological processes.

**Authors:**

Chiara Mazzocconi: Aix-Marseille University; Céline Hidalgo: La Timone Children’s Hospital; Charlie Hallart: Aix-Marseille University; Leonardo Lancia: Aix-Marseille University; Roxane Bertrand: Aix-Marseille Université; Stéphane Roman: La Timone Children’s Hospital; Daniele Schön: Aix-Marseille University

"I hear you! But conversing together is a bit different...!": Interactional dynamics in children with cochlear implants

In this preregistered study, we investigated whether emotional inner speech has an effect on heart rate. Participants were asked to engage in 3-minute sessions of either: positive inner speech, negative inner speech, or inner counting while their heart rate was monitored. Participants were lying on a bed and asked to remain still during the inner speech trials. Motion tracking was applied to control for body movement. Median heart rate across each inner speech session was analyzed and a significant increase was found between emotional inner speech and inner counting. No difference between positive and negative inner speech was observed. Post-hoc analyses investigated the relationship between movement and heart rate increases and found an effect with a peak lag of approximately 14 seconds. Removing these effects did not change the effect emotional inner speech had on heart rate. Additional analyses showed that heart rate and respiration rate were linked, as suggested by the literature. Including respiration rate as a variable in regression analyses did not alter the effect of emotion. The effect thus seems to be robust.

**Authors:**

Mikkel Wallentin: Aarhus University; Line Kruse: Aarhus University; Anja Feibel Meerwald: Aarhus University; David Trøst Fjendbo: Aarhus University; Johanne Nedergaard: University of Copenhagen

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