Netherlands

Iconicity (the resemblance between form and meaning) exists in various modes of communication. This study investigated whether adults interpret iconicity in speech and gesture via a modality-independent process. We tested 348 adult participants and assessed their ability to use iconic prosody and iconic gesture cues when interpreting novel verb meanings. We manipulated the rate of the spoken novel verbs (iconic prosody) and the rate of observed hand movements (iconic gestures) to be either fast or slow in two verb-action matching tasks. Adults could use these iconic speed cues to interpret novel verbs as referring to a fast or slow version of the same action. Adults who used iconic prosody cues for interpreting novel verbs also used iconic gesture cues for interpreting novel verbs and showed similar task performances. This positive correlation persisted even after controlling verbal working memory. Thus, we conclude that adults possess a modality-independent ability for interpreting iconicity.

**Authors:**

Mingtong Li: University of Warwick; Suzanne Aussems: University of Warwick; Sotaro Kita: University of Warwick

CogSci 2024

Is adults’ ability to interpret iconicity shared between the spoken and gestural modalities?

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


CogSci 2021

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. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE**<br>
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25**<br>
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)<br>
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)<br>
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Friday, July 26**<br>
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)<br>
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration)<br>
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Saturday, July 27**<br>
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)<br>
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture)<br>


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **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**<br>
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY**<br>
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.

The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.
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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.

Combining words in new ways is a hallmark of linguistic generativity. Previous work has shown that people's understanding of novel noun-noun combinations is influenced by the linguistic distributional information associated with a compound’s constituents - words closer in semantic space are more likely to be judged as sensible/interpretable, and processed more quickly, than constituents that are further apart in semantic space. We extend this work by investigating whether two levels of linguistic distributional knowledge (first-order local co-occurrences, second-order contextual similarity), and the sensorimotor similarity of the constituents, impact people’s processing effort. In two experimental studies, we found that linguistic distributional information facilitated processing of novel combinations for both shallow sensibility judgements, and deeper interpretation generation. Effects were stronger for interpretation generation, and for distributional measures, but these effects were mediated by the concrete/abstract nature of a compound’s head noun. The findings support embodied theories that propose a strong role for linguistic distributional information.

**Authors:**

Dermot Lynott: Maynooth University; Louise Connell: Maynooth University; Dounia Lakhzoum: Maynooth University

Do linguistic distributional information and constituent sensorimotor similarity affect people’s comprehension of novel noun-noun compounds?

This study investigated the effects of consonant alliteration and meter on valence, arousal, and aesthetic evaluations. In Study 1, native Japanese speakers evaluated valence, arousal, beauty, and understandability after listening to Japanese classical poems that alliterated and non-alliterated. The alliterated poems were rated slightly calmer than non-alliterated ones although the difference was not statistically significant. In Study 2, native Japanese speakers listened to poems that consisted of pseudowords. The poems used as stimuli were systematically made in terms of alliteration and meter. The metered poems were perceived as more preferable, calmer, more beautiful, and more understandable than the non-metered ones, whereas the alliterated poems were perceived as less preferable, more excited, and less beautiful than the non-alliterated ones. These results suggest that metered poems make people feel beautiful and comfortable. It might be applicable to clinical treatments.

**Authors:**

Mizuki Yoshio: Hiroshima University; Toshimune Kambara: Hiroshima University

Aesthetic and affective effects of consonant alliteration and meter in Japanese poems

Humans are surrounded by dynamic, continuous streams of stimuli, yet the human mind segments these stimuli and organizes them into discrete event units. Theories of language production assume that segmenting and construing an event provides a starting point for speaking about the event (Levelt, 1989; Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2018). However, the precise units of event representation and their mapping to language remain elusive. In this work, we examine event unit formation in linguistic and conceptual event representations. Given cross-linguistic differences in motion event encoding (satellite vs. verb-framed languages), we investigate the extent to which such differences in forming linguistic motion event units affect how speakers of different languages form cognitive event units in non-linguistic tasks. We test English (satellite-framed) and Turkish (verb-framed) speakers on verbal and non-verbal motion event tasks. Our results show that speakers do not rely on the same event unit representations when verbalizing motion vs. identifying motion event units in non-verbal tasks. Therefore, we suggest that conceptual and linguistic event representations are related but distinct levels of event structure.

**Authors:**

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

Forming Event Units in Language and Cognition: A Cross-linguistic Investigation

Numbers and space are associated in the mind, and in language. We investigate 6,400 instances of verbs indicating vertical movement (e.g., rise, fall, decline) or size-based changes (e.g., contract, grow, extend) in four corpora, showing that 60% of all uses occur in quantitative contexts (e.g., ‘prices rose’). For concrete spatial language, it has been found that movement goals are more likely encoded than sources (e.g., Lakusta & Landau 2005, Stefanowitsch, 2018). We demonstrate that this asymmetry carries over to spatial-numerical language, which more often encodes goals (e.g., ‘revenue went up to 48 million’) than sources (e.g., ‘share prices rose from $7.13’). In line with their path-related meaning, vertical verbs showed a much higher propensity to encode endpoints (20%) than size-based verbs (10%), a large effect (Cohen’s d = 2.0). These results show that the goal bias attested for spatial language carries over to abstract conceptual domains.

**Authors:**

Vinicius Macuch Silva: University of Birmingham; Alexandra Lorson: University of Groningen; Greg Woodin: University of Birmingham; Bodo Winter: University of Birmingham

Goal bias in using spatial language to describe changing quantities

Face-to-face communication is highly complex, with information being transmitted via multiple channels simultaneously. Social gaze can regulate conversation, express emotions, and signal interest or disinterest, and eye contact, or a lack thereof, is a powerful visual cue that influences the dynamics of communication. While previous research has shed light on gaze in autism in general, there remains a lack of 1) evidence on interactions in dialogue between autistic adults (rather than mixed dialogues) and 2) investigations on the influence of gaze on conversational dynamics and interpersonal rapport. We have developed a novel setup with mobile dual eye-tracking glasses that allows for the automatic detection of mutual eye contact. Our exploratory analyses of conversations in homogeneous autistic dyads provide new insights into autistic gaze dynamics and their interrelation with rapport, ultimately helping to advance the current understanding of cognitive diversity and of the fundamental elements of social interaction.

**Authors:**

Malin Spaniol: University Hospital Cologne; Simon Wehrle: University of Cologne; Kai Vogeley: University Hospital Cologne; Martine Grice: University of Cologne

Interactions between autistic adults offer a new perspective on social gaze

This study examined how vowel length in words affects the gustatory imageries (i.e., sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, sourness, and spiciness). We presented pseudowords containing long and short vowels to native Japanese speakers varying modalities and instructions. The stimuli were presented visually (Study 1, 3, and 4) or auditorily (Study 2). Furthermore, half of participants in Study 3 were instructed to subvocalize the stimuli and the other half not to subvocalize. Words including long vowels were associated with sweetness when presented in katakana characters (Study 1 and 3). Words including short vowels were associated with saltiness when presented in katakana characters (Study 3). Also, words including short vowels were associated with bitterness when presented in hiragana characters (Study 4). Our findings reveal a role of vowel length in taste-sound correspondences in Japanese. It advances the understanding how people obtain information about the expectations of tastes from word forms.

**Authors:**

Toshimune Kambara: Hiroshima University; Mizuki Yoshio: Hiroshima University; Nodoka Okada: Hiroshima University; Rea Kawano: Hiroshima University; Norika Kondo: Hiroshima University; Sho Tamakawa: Hiroshima University

Associations between gustatory imageries and vowel length in Japanese food names

Previous studies have demonstrated that bilinguals have discrete representations for speech sounds that are phonemic in both of their languages. In a lexical identification task for Singapore Mandarin words 椅 (/i2/ ‘chair’) and 鱼 (/y2/ ‘fish’), we find steepness of the identification functions differs among bilinguals with different linguistic experience, with steeper slopes for early English-Mandarin bilinguals (for whom the /y/ vowel is phonemic) and shallower slopes for early English-Malay bilinguals (for whom /y/ is not phonemic, but is largely discriminable in the forced choice task). With nuanced language background information, this finding suggests that exposure to both /i/ and /y/ in early development shapes phonemic perception. Model comparisons demonstrate that continuous measures of early exposure are more powerful than simple categorical groupings of bilingual ‘type’. Continuous measures of bilingual exposure are therefore highlighted as useful tools in the investigation of phoneme perception.

**Authors:**

Lei Pan: National Institute of Education; Suzy J. Styles: Nanyang Technological University

Missing /y/: Vowel perception in bilinguals whose languages differ in whether the high front rounded vowel is phonemic

Speakers and listeners show an informativity bias in the use and interpretation of color modifiers. For example, speakers use color more often when referring to objects that vary in color than to objects with a prototypical color. Likewise, listeners look away from objects with prototypical colors upon hearing that color mentioned. Here we test whether speakers and listeners account for another factor related to informativity: the strength of the association between lexical categories and color. Our results demonstrate that speakers and listeners’ choices are indeed influenced by this factor; as such, it should be integrated into current pragmatic theories of informativity and computational models of color reference.

**Authors:**

Madeleine Long: University of Edinburgh; Paula Rubio-Fernández: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words

Because information theory equates information with event occurrence probabilities, when applying its methods, language researchers typically take the information provided by words to be their relative frequencies in a corpus. This implicitly assumes words occur uniformly across contexts, however empirically, word distributions are bursty: the likelihood of most words appearing in most contexts is small, whereas the likelihood of a word recurring in context is much higher. In an elicitation study we examined whether speakers are sensitive to the dynamic word occurrence probabilities this implies. Consistent with proposals that prenominal adjectives increase noun predictability, participants produced numerous seemingly redundant adjectives prior to unambiguous nouns at first mention. However, despite receiving no feedback, they produced significantly fewer adjectives before subsequent mentions of the same nouns, indicating they had re-evaluated their probabilities. These results support the idea that prenominal adjectives facilitate efficient communication, and that speakers' representations of lexical probabilities are dynamic.

**Authors:**

Santina Simone Kemper: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ; Holly Elizabeth Jenkins: University of Oxford; Elizabeth Wonnacott: University of Oxford; Michael Ramscar: University of Tübingen

Rethinking Probabilities: Why Corpus Frequencies Cannot Capture Speakers' Dynamic Linguistic Behavior

Our world knowledge is deeply embedded in language. The word “banana” immediately brings to our mind the color “yellow”. Oftentimes, however, when we read about “banana”, we do not expect the color “yellow” to be explicitly mentioned as in “yellow banana”. Omission of the obvious information in our world knowledge is predicted by the so-called informativity expectations, which captures our preferences for newsworthy and informative utterances. Here we present two studies investigating informativity expectations in a socially situated context and testing whether expressions like “female nurses” are less preferred than expressions like “female directors”. While the results showed a clear impact of the informativity expectations, effects of gender stereotypes turned out to be difficult to overcome.

**Authors:**

Hailin Hao: University of Southern California; Muxuan He: University of Southern California; Zuzanna Fuchs: University of Southern California

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