Patterns of language use change over time and may reflect and/or impact lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan.
In the current study, we quantified differences in lexico-semantic organization of different age groups and tested how they may be related to diachronic language change (measured using usage patterns in corpora from different decades).
Using diachronic word embeddings, we sampled words that have changed in meaning and words that have maintained the same meaning/usage patterns and tested how relatedness judgments differ when paired with word "neighbors'' from earlier vs. recent decades, for both younger and older adults.
Our findings suggest that individuals continuously update their lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan, and that the age-related differences may be due in part to the idiosyncratic language experience of older adults.
These results demonstrate the potential importance of considering language change when investigating lexico-semantic representations and aging.

Diachronic Language Change and Its Influence on Lexico-semantic Representations Across the Lifespan

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that human sentence comprehension is predictive. The current study investigates if this is also the case in the realm of argument structure. Previous studies using the cross-modal priming (CMP) paradigm show that whether and when the subject is reactivated after the encounter with the verb depends on the type of the verb (unaccusative vs. unergative). We hypothesized that this is because the human parser predicts the verb type in advance. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a CMP experiment and manipulated the parser’s prediction by changing the bias on the verb type in the experimental stimuli. We found that the reactivation pattern interacts with the bias, as expected by our hypothesis.

Unaccusativity, expectation, and reactivation of the subject in sentence comprehension

Many studies show that language comprehenders track multiple object state-changes during event comprehension. In this research, we investigate if comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects. In Experiments 1 to 3, participants were asked to verify whether the object depicted in a picture was mentioned in the previously read sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or not (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, participants were faster to verify that an object was mentioned in the sentence if its pictured state matched the state implied by the sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were slower to verify pictured objects (e.g., cake) after reading a sentence that implied multiple states for a semantically similar (e.g., egg) rather than dissimilar (e.g., thermometer) object. Thus, comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects.

Representation of object state-changes of semantically similar objects

This study investigated how observing pitch gestures conveying lexical tones and representational gestures conveying word meanings when learning L2 Mandarin words differing in lexical tone affects their subsequent semantic and phonological processing in L1 English speakers using the N400 event-related potential (ERP). Larger N400s for English target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in meaning were observed for words learned with pitch and representational gesture, but not no gesture. Additionally, larger N400s for Mandarin target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in lexical tone were observed for words learned with pitch gesture, but not representational or no gesture. These findings provide the first ERP evidence that observing gestures conveying phonological and semantic information during L2 word learning enhances subsequent phonological and semantic processing of learned L2 words.

Observing Gestures During L2 Word Learning Facilitates Implicit Differentiation Between Unfamiliar Speech Sounds and Word Meanings

As humans, we make sense of the world by organizing our daily experiences in terms of structured events. Events involve multiple participants, referred to as thematic roles. Here, we explore how thematic roles map onto language by investigating how speakers of two typologically different languages (English, Turkish) describe events that involve more peripheral event participants (Recipients, Instruments), whose conceptual status is highly debated. We manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that either ‘require’ or ‘allow’ Recipients and Instruments.
Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not affect mention of recipients and instruments in any language. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that mention of participant roles in language is affected by factors beyond the cognitive salience of the roles.

A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production

Why are some words more frequent than others? Some reasons are self-evident. We have far more reasons to use a word like ”eat” than a word like ”diagonalize”. But robust differences in frequency are also observed for words with seemingly equal communicative usefulness. For example, hot and cold seem equally important for communicating temperature yet hot in English is more frequent than cold. We focused on antonym pairs such as these and sought to predict differences in frequency from the connection patterns of these words in a semantic network while controlling for predictors like the number of word senses. Two network properties predicted word frequency especially well: the number of connections the word and its surrounding words have, and the ability of the
word to connect less interconnected words. These two network properties not only predicted present word frequency, but also predicted future frequency changes suggesting a potential causality relationship between network properties and word frequency. Overall, this study offers new insights into the underlying causes of differences in word frequency and highlights the importance of considering a network perspective when examining how word frequency evolves.


Understanding the Frequency of a Word by its Associates: A Network Perspective

The world’s languages differ in how they order adjectives and nouns relative to each other. We ask whether cross-linguistic variation and systematicity in adjective-noun order can be explained by the iterated pressure for pragmatic referential communication. To this end, we formalize cooperative pressures on referential communication in the Rational Speech Act framework in an iterated learning setting. First, we show that the less informative adjectives are relative to nouns, the more likely they are to occur post-nominally. This is the case when informativeness is manipulated via the composition of the lexical space (i.e., changing the relative number of adjectives vs. nouns that are available for reference), and via the inherent referential utility of adjectives vs. nouns. Secondly, we show that under the assumption that nouns are on average more informative than adjectives, the model predicts a cross-linguistic distribution of ordering preferences that qualitatively resembles the empirical one, with these biases becoming further entrenched with iterated language use. Taken together, these results suggest a possible pathway for syntactic preferences to be calcified over time as the result of pragmatic communicative pressures on language.


The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication

While naturalistic daylong audio recordings of children’s auditory environments have the potential to reveal key insights about the input children receive and inform our theories of language development, it also presents various methodological hurdles. In the present work, we used three fully transcribed daylong audio recordings to investigate the challenge of manually extrapolating aggregate statistics and quantify the kinds of sampling choices daylong researchers can make. Our findings highlight sampling choices that maximize sampling from the full distribution of the day and potential tradeoffs between human effort and obtaining accuracy.


Optimizing Random Sampling of Daylong Audio

Projection inferences are inferences about speaker commitment to a content embedded under an entailment-canceling operator, such as polar interrogatives with clause-embedding predicates (e.g., Does John know that Julian dances salsa?) Inferred speaker belief regarding whether Julian dances salsa is modulated by multiple factors, including the predicate used, interlocutors' prior beliefs about the content, and the content's at-issueness. We propose a first step towards a unified probabilistic model of projection inferences about content embedded under clause-embedding predicates, couched in the RSA framework. In a behavioral study, we investigate the beliefs about contents embedded under the predicates ``think'' and ``know'' that listeners ascribe to the speaker and a potential attitude holder (John). The empirical data were used to inform the model. The resulting model predictions mirror some, but not all, of the qualitative empirical patterns. This is the first step toward a systematic analysis of projection inferences using probabilistic pragmatic models.


Towards a computational account of projection inferences in clause-embedding predicates

Using evidential expressions to indicate one’s source of information for an utterance tends to convey uncertainty on the speaker’s part. Previous accounts of this uncertainty inference attribute it to either extralinguistic reasoning about evidence directness, or to pragmatic reasoning about alternative utterances. Here we present a novel hybrid account, and introduce a set of utterances which allows us to tease apart the three accounts’ predictions. We test these predictions in two studies by manipulating the directness of evidence indicated by an evidential expression. Exp. 1 shows that listeners infer more uncertainty with extreme values of directness. Exp. 2 shows that speakers are more likely to indicate evidence in contexts where the evidence is unreliable. We argue that these findings support an account which involves both extralinguistic and pragmatic reasoning, and develop a formal implementation of such an account within the Rational Speech Act framework.


Evidential uncertainty involves both pragmatic and extralinguistic reasoning: a computational account

Representational gestures are co-speech gestures that carry semantic content related to the content of speech. Previous studies focusing on adult-adult conversation have investigated the temporal alignment of gestures and speech finding that the overwhelming majority of representational gestures are produced right before the lexical content they refer to (their lexical affiliate, LA). However, nothing is yet known about whether caregivers would also time their gestures in the same way in naturalistic interactions. We annotated representational gestures from a large corpus (anonymized) of semi-naturalistic conversations between caregivers and their 3-4 year old children (n = 899 gestures from n=36 caregivers). We found that, just as in adult-directed language (ADL), representational gestures in child-directed language (CDL) were more tightly linked to the onset of LAs than the onset of the utterance in which Las were produced (hence planned when full events are encoded); with the overall majority of the representational gestures starting before their LAs. We further found that age of acquisition (AoA) rating of the LA had a significant effect on the speech-gesture latency. We found that for words acquired earlier, the gesture’s stroke (the meaningful part of a gesture) tended to be produced before the LA’s onset; for the later acquired word, the stroke tended to be produced at the same time or after the onset of the LA in speech. Our findings suggest that: (1) Regardless of their addressee, speakers always time the production of representational gestures to specific conceptual/linguistic units, rather than the full event/utterance. (2) In contrast to ADL, caregivers’ gestures may support addresses’ linguistic processing not only by supporting word prediction (of likely better known words), but also by supporting the learning of conceptual features (of likely less well-known words).


How Speech and Representational Gestures Align in Child-Directed Language: a Corpus-based Study

Core vocabulary is a topic of huge interest in linguistics and has been studied from a wide variety of perspectives, such as language learning, dictionary studies, and cross-linguistically. In many of these conceptions, word frequency is widely considered the conventional measure of a word's coreness; however, this approach overlooks important aspects of mental representation like centrality in an associative semantic network. In this experiment, we compare different approaches to defining core words in a task that involves predicting missing words in sentences. Results showed that core words (regardless of definition) were easier to guess than non-core words, but that frequency-defined ones did not perform as well as expected given their higher predictability and the nature of the task. Analysis of incorrect responses also showed that people preferred to guess core words, simple synonyms, and words that are taxonomically related to the target. The findings suggest that how core vocabulary is defined depends in part on the nature of the task and that aspects of both mental representation and the linguistic environment play an important role.

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Diachronic Language Change and Its Influence on Lexico-semantic Representations Across the Lifespan

Unaccusativity, expectation, and reactivation of the subject in sentence comprehension

Representation of object state-changes of semantically similar objects

Observing Gestures During L2 Word Learning Facilitates Implicit Differentiation Between Unfamiliar Speech Sounds and Word Meanings

A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production

Understanding the Frequency of a Word by its Associates: A Network Perspective

The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication

Optimizing Random Sampling of Daylong Audio

Towards a computational account of projection inferences in clause-embedding predicates

Evidential uncertainty involves both pragmatic and extralinguistic reasoning: a computational account

How Speech and Representational Gestures Align in Child-Directed Language: a Corpus-based Study

Word Prediction in Context: An Empirical Investigation of Core Vocabulary

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