A basic question in the study of human cognition concerns the ability to encode and retrieve associations between pairs of meaningful elements such as words. We employed a standard version of a paired-associate learning task using novel, arbitrary word pairs (restricted to nouns) presented one pair at a time during study without direct warning of a memory test to follow. After a distraction task, participants were provided with a cued-recall task which provided either the first or second word from each of the studied pairings. This paradigm was used to investigate the impact of two study tasks inspired by research in the domain of higher-order cognition. Specifically, we proposed a benefit in cued recall due to either: 1) articulating a conceptual combination of the two provided concepts, i.e., generating a novel integrative concept that might be referenced by the noun-noun pairing; or 2) articulating a specific proposition about how the two provided concepts could interact by fulfilling the roles of a semantic relationship. To illustrate, a pair of words like "cloth" and "donkey" might be integrated via conceptual combination to refer to a stuffed animal or via relational linking to indicate that a cloth could be draped over a donkey. The control condition in the experimental design was a simple imagery-based support task to allow assessment of the impact of the novel support tasks above and beyond the role of imagery. The results show that both study tasks dramatically improve memory performance.

Conceptual Integration and Semantic Relational Processing as Study Tasks to Promote Cued-Recall of Word Pairs

Humans are surrounded by various typefaces, and the preliminary corpus analysis suggests that typefaces commonly used in picture books differ from others, which implies that familiar typefaces differ between children and adults. Thus, this study investigated whether children can easily recognize fonts considered familiar to them. Japanese-speaking children (aged 7–8 years) performed a hiragana-character discrimination task, which includes different (e.g., あ–お) and same (e.g.,あ–あ) character–pair conditions. It involves various typefaces familiar to children (i.e., picture book typefaces) or adults; the study indexed discriminability using averaged reaction times to the character–pair conditions. Accuracy was sufficiently high for all typefaces (>90%), and no significant difference existed in response times between any typeface. The results suggested that children can stably discriminate characters regardless of whether or not a font is commonly used in picture books.

Discriminability of picture book typeface in children

Recent research in experimental language evolution has considered how a pressure for efficient communication---i.e., the trade-off between production effort and communicative accuracy---impacts language structure. For instance, there is evidence that the use (or non-use) of case marking is influenced by this trade-off: both in natural languages, and in experimental studies of artificial language learning, case marking of grammatical arguments is more likely to be used in languages with flexible word order, and less likely in languages with fixed word order as a cue to argument structure. However, experimental evidence also suggests that social biases can influence efficiency. Language learners are themselves less efficient when there is a social bias in favour of a group whose productions are inefficient---e.g., who use case redundantly in a fixed word order language. Like the vast majority of studies in experimental psychology, studies on communicative efficiency and other cognitive factors that might shape language have been conducted on neurotypical populations. Here, we examine how the influence of social biases on efficient communication is impacted by autistic traits. We find that autistic people's use of case in the absence of a social bias is comparative to their neurotypical peers. However, we also find evidence that autistic people adhere more to social biases. In particular, they increase production effort in order to behave more like the group they are biased towards. We argue that some autistic people may be more likely to adhere to a social bias as a result of learnt social behaviours. More generally, these results underscore the importance of studying more diverse populations in language evolution research.

How communicative efficiency and social biases shape language in autistic and allistic learners

Online experiments with participants from around the world speaking different languages can inform research about culture, cognition, and language. To achieve this, it is necessary to objectively assess participants' language proficiency. However, available proficiency tests are small and only cover a few languages, making them unsuitable for cross-cultural online studies. Here, we present an automated pipeline to generate vocabulary tests based on Wikipedia called ``WikiVocab". Our pipeline samples rare nouns from a word-frequency distribution and creates pseudowords with the same low-level statistics. Six behavioral experiments (N=236) show that (a) our test can distinguish between native speakers of closely related languages, (b) participants' scores are consistent across test items, and (c) performance strongly correlates with existing tests (LexTale) and self-reports. We benchmark our results with GPT-3 and show that test accuracy and language distance are negatively correlated. Our test, available in eight languages, can easily be extended to other languages.


Around the world in 60 words: A generative vocabulary test for online research

Psycholinguistic analyses provide a means of evaluating large language model (LLM) output and making systematic comparisons to human-generated text. These methods can be used to characterize the psycholinguistic properties of LLM output and illustrate areas where LLMs fall short in comparison to human-generated text. In this work, we apply psycholinguistic methods to evaluate the psycholinguistic properties within sentences from student-generated long-form analogies about biochemical concepts. We compare analogies generated by human subjects enrolled in introductory biochemistry courses to analogies generated by chatGPT. We use 78 features extracted from Coh-metrix that analyze text cohesion, language, and readability (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004). We perform an unsupervised cluster analysis. Results illustrate a high level of performance for clustering student-generated and chatGPT-generated analogies. To evaluate which features contribute most to model performance, we use a hierarchical cluster analysis. Results from the hierarchical cluster analysis illustrate several linguistic differences between the two groups.


Long-form analogies generated by chatGPT lack human-like psycholinguistic properties

Utterances mentioning a highly predictable event are known to elicit atypicality inferences (Kravtchenko and Demberg, 2015; 2022). In those studies, pragmatic inferences are measured based on typicality ratings. It is assumed that comprehenders notice the redundancy and "repair'' the utterance informativity by inferring that the mentioned event is atypical for the referent, resulting in a lower typicality rating. However, the actual inferences that people make have never been elicited. We extend the original experimental design by asking participants to explain their ratings and administering several individual differences tests. This allows us to test (1) whether low ratings indeed correspond to the assumed inferences (they mostly do, but occasionally participants seem to make the inference but then reject it and give high ratings), and (2) whether the tendency to make atypicality inferences is modulated by cognitive factors. We find that people with higher reasoning abilities are more likely to draw inferences.

What inferences do people actually make upon encountering informationally redundant utterances? An individual differences study

Working with School-Age Children who Stutter: Evaluation, Therapy, Empowerment, Connection, and Inclusion

<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yGl1Yp9Z87g-Cddk6hicfgUS7GXsWTEP/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs">**CHAT REFERENCE CHART**</a>




Let's CHAT: Supervising Students, CFs and SLPAs With a Visual Hierarchy

Developing Preliminary Clinical Taxonomy and Treatment Fidelity Tool: Stuttering Treatment

Creating a Linguistically and Culturally-Responsive Children’s Book about Stuttering: Methodological Considerations

The subjective value of a choice option is modified by its potential outcomes, when those outcomes will be realized, how likely the outcomes are, and the valence associated with these outcomes (gains, losses). People’s preferences in risky or intertemporal choice are often described by models like hyperbolic discounting, expected utility theory, and prospect theory. This study tested these models by eliciting hypothetical monetary choices along a continuum of tradeoffs between amount versus delay, amount versus risk, and amount to be gained versus amount to be lost. Offering a continuum of options allowed us to test qualitative predictions of the model – for example, a hyperbolic discounting model predicts that participants should never respond in the middle of a continuous scale where payoff is a linear function of delay. The results qualitatively falsify several common models, suggesting that current theories of binary choice are insufficient to account for valuation along a continuum.

Impulsivity, risk-taking, and loss aversion in a continuous response task

In this paper, we have studied the impact of clickbait headlines on the distribution of visual attention on hyperlinked news articles. Visual attention is a driving factor in ad-based revenue models that support online journalism. Importantly, it is also an indicator of cognitive processes involved in reading and comprehension. We hypothesize that articles with clickbait headlines receive lesser visual attention when controlled for articles’ content. This is based on the premise that a significant proportion of clicks on clickbait headlines are driven by readers’ specific epistemic curiosity rather than knowledge acquisition. An eye-tracker setup was used to infer visual attention from the gaze-fixation analysis conducted on data from 60 participants. Our results suggest that clickbait headlines significantly reduce the visual attention on news articles. Though, article content comprehension measured by a recall test was comparable for clickbait and non-clickbait headlines. Our findings add to the discussions on the cognitive attention and the implications of using clickbait headlines for news publishers, newsreaders, and advertising agencies alike.

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Conceptual Integration and Semantic Relational Processing as Study Tasks to Promote Cued-Recall of Word Pairs

Discriminability of picture book typeface in children

How communicative efficiency and social biases shape language in autistic and allistic learners

Around the world in 60 words: A generative vocabulary test for online research

Long-form analogies generated by chatGPT lack human-like psycholinguistic properties

What inferences do people actually make upon encountering informationally redundant utterances? An individual differences study

Working with School-Age Children who Stutter: Evaluation, Therapy, Empowerment, Connection, and Inclusion

Let's CHAT: Supervising Students, CFs and SLPAs With a Visual Hierarchy

Developing Preliminary Clinical Taxonomy and Treatment Fidelity Tool: Stuttering Treatment

Creating a Linguistically and Culturally-Responsive Children’s Book about Stuttering: Methodological Considerations

Impulsivity, risk-taking, and loss aversion in a continuous response task

Clickbait’s Impact on Visual Attention – An Eye Tracker Study

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