Languages exhibit a tremendous amount of variation in how they organise and order morphemes within words; however, regularities are also found. For example, gender and number inflectional morphology tend to appear together within a single affix, and when they appear in two separate affixes, gender marking tends to be placed closer to the stem than number. Formal theories of gender and number have been designed (in part) to explain these tendencies. However, determining whether the abstract representations hypothesised by these theories indeed drive the patterns we find cross-linguistically is difficult, if not impossible, based on the natural language data alone. In this study we use an artificial language learning paradigm to test whether the inferences learners make about the order of gender and number affixes—in the absence of any explicit information in the input—accord with formal theories of how they are represented. We test two different populations, English and Italian speakers, with substantially differ- ent gender systems in their first language. Our results suggest a clear preference for placing gender closest to the noun across these populations, across different types of gender systems, and across prefixing and suffixing morphology. These results expand the range of behavioural evidence for the role of cognitive representations in determining morpheme order.


Speakers' cognitive representations of gender and number morphology shape cross-linguistic tendencies in morpheme order

Languages seem to be designed for efficient communication. For example, shorter forms are used for more predictable meanings, a tendency argued to stem from speakers’ efficient language use. However, no study to date has systematically tested whether communicative efficiency shapes children’s language use. Investigating whether such a pressure is already present in children will shed light on the development of children’s’ communicative behaviour and the respective roles of adults and children in shaping language structure. Here, we investigate the development of communicative efficiency using a novel experimental paradigm with children ages 4-10. Results show that communicative efficiency is attested already in young children and becomes more adult-like with age: as children grow, they are more likely to shorten messages (minimize effort) when a short message is sufficient for accurate communication. We discuss the implications of our results for cognitive development and for theories of language evolution and change.

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

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

Is the mind equipped with universal biases? If so, how can we account for the well-recognized diversity ofhuman cognition? And if universal biases do exist,what is their source—do theyreflect innate principles of core knowledge, or can they emerge from domain-general pressures? Finally, how can we, cognitive scientists, “get” human nature better—minimizing the pitfalls of our intuitive cognitive biases and our narrow WEIRD perspective?This symposium seeks to address the question of human nature from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. We begin by examining the notion of “human nature” and the concept of innateness (Samuels)and exploring some of the challenges facing its discovery by the confinements of our own human cognition (Berent). The next talk (Culbertson) exposesthe tensions between cognitive universals and diversity in the domain of language, contrasts domain-specific with domain-general explanations of these facts, and demonstratesthe merits of a cross-linguistic perspective. The last talk (Majid) considershow language is used to express perceptual categories across cultures, explores how culture and nurture can shed light on human nature, and highlightssome of the challenges in sifting through the tight nature-nurture interactions. Throughout these four talks, we hope to highlight both theoretical gains and limits in our current understanding of innateness anddomain-specificity, the value of exploring human diversity, and the challenges we, humans face when we seek to explore our own human nature.

Innateness, Universals, Diversity

Syntactic harmony occurs when heads and dependents align within and across different types of phrases in a language. Harmony is a well-known (statistical) typological universal: in most languages, many if not all heads and dependents are consistently ordered (i.e., either head-dependent, or dependent-head). Despite decades of work, from every conceivable theoretical perspective, the origins of syntactic harmony remain opaque. However, recent work using artificial language learning has suggested that harmonic patterns are easier to learn than their non-harmonic counter-parts. Thus at least part of the explanation for this tendency may be linked to learning. Here, we explore whether the mechanism behind the learning bias for syntactic harmony is fundamentally domain-general by instantiating harmony in non-linguistic stimuli. Our findings support the claim that the origins of syntactic harmony lie in a domain-general bias for simplicity acting on linearized, language-specific categories.


Syntactic harmony arises from a domain-general learning bias

Cross-linguistically, heads tend to be ordered consistently relative to dependents. This tendency is called Cross-Category Harmony. Alternative explanations for harmony include cognitive and non-cognitive processes (e.g., grammaticalization pathways), but evidence disentangling them is still lacking. We report two artificial language learning experiments testing harmony between verb phrases (VP) and adpositional phrases (PP) and between VPs and noun phrases consisting of adjectives and nouns (NP). These two cases are critically different: typological evidence for the former is strong but there is no typological evidence for the latter. Our results parallel the typology; we find a strong preference for harmonic orders between VP and PP regardless whether the participants’ native language has harmonic order (English speakers) or mixed orders (Chinese speakers), but no preference for harmonic order between VP and NP. This suggests that a cognitive bias for harmony may play a role in shaping typology.

A Cognitive Bias for Cross-Category Word Order Harmony

Human language is often assumed to make "infinite use of finite means" - that is, to generate an infinite number of possible utterances from a finite number of building blocks. From an acquisition perspective, this assumed property of language is interesting because learners must acquire their languages from a finite number of examples. To acquire an infinite language, learners must therefore generalize beyond the finite bounds of the linguistic data they have observed. In this work, we use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether people generalize in this way. We train participants on sequences from a simple grammar featuring center embedding, where the training sequences have at most two levels of embedding, and then evaluate whether participants accept sequences of a greater depth of embedding. We find that, when participants learn the pattern for sequences of the sizes they have observed, they also extrapolate it to sequences with a greater depth of embedding. These results support the hypothesis that the learning biases of humans favor languages with an infinite generative capacity.

Infinite use of finite means? Evaluating the generalization of center embedding learned from an artificial grammar

Systems of personal pronouns (e.g.,`you' and `I') vary widely across languages, but at the same time not all possible systems are attested. Linguistic theories have generally accounted for this in terms of strong grammatical constraints, but recent experimental work challenges this view. Here, we take a novel approach to understanding personal pronoun systems by invoking a recent information-theoretic framework for semantic systems that predicts that languages efficiently compress meanings into forms. We find that a test set of cross-linguistically attested personal pronoun systems achieves near-optimal compression, supporting the hypothesis that efficient compression shapes semantic systems. Further, our best-fitting model includes an egocentric bias that favors a salient speaker representation, accounting for a well-known typological generalization of person systems (`Zwicky's Generalization') without the need for a hard grammatical constraint.

Let's talk (efficiently) about us: Person systems achieve near-optimal compression

Morphosyntactic rules are central to compositional structure in language, and therefore crucial in language acquisition. Previous research on L1 and L2 acquisition suggests that active production leads learners to notice linguistic generalisations more than passive learning does. Here, we explore whether production helps learners to access less obvious generalisations when more than one analysis is possible. We taught participants an artificial language compatible with two grammatical analyses: one that marks semantic roles using word order, the other using case suffixes. After training, half of the participants do a comprehension task, and the other half do a production task. We predict that the comprehension group will adopt the English-like word order analysis, while the production group will be more likely to learn the recurring case suffixes and thus adopt the alternative analysis. Overall, our results shed light on the role of retrieval and production for the acquisition of morphosyntactic generalisations.

Does production facilitate learning morphosyntactic generalisations?

Classifiers are a noun categorization device found in many East and Southeast Asian languages. Their syntactic status is debated: some theories treat them as forming a constituent with the noun, others with the numeral. Typological data on how classifiers, numerals, and nouns are ordered largely support the classifier-with-numeral hypothesis: orders in which the noun intervenes between the numeral and the classifier are unattested. However, typological evidence is problematic in this case, because the distribution of classifiers is highly geographically constrained, and ordering tendencies may reflect language contact. In this study, we look for evidence of the syntactic status of classifiers using artificial language learning experiments. We test whether learners’ preference among patterns are predicted by one of these two accounts. Results suggest that, if anything, learners in fact prefer orders that group classifiers with the numeral.

Cognitive biases for word order between numeral, classifier and noun

T.38: Syntax & Morphology

technical paper

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference. 
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CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Poster Session 3 

poster

**Speakers**: Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Chair; Richard Samuels, The Ohio State University; Jennifer Culbertson, University of Edinburgh; Asifa Majid, Oxford University
 
 
What is human nature like: is the mind equipped with innate principles of core knowledge? If so, how can we account for the well-recognized diversity in human cognition? And how can we, cognitive scientists, “get” human nature better—minimizing the pitfalls of our intuitive cognitive biases and our narrow WEIRD perspective? This symposium seeks to address the question of human nature from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. We begin by examining the notion of “human nature” and the concept of innateness (Samuels) and exploring some of the challenges facing its discovery by the confinements of our own human cognition (Berent). The next talk (Culbertson) explores the tensions between cognitive universals and diversity in the domain of language and demonstrates the merits of a cross-linguistic perspective. The last talk (Majid) considers how culture and nurture can shed light on human nature by examining the linguistic expression of perceptual categories across cultures.

Symposium 6: Innateness, Universals, Diversity

symposium

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
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CogSci 2022

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





Poster Session 5: Language processing, representation, and use


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Poster Session 2 -  C : Cognitive Science

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**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.

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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 Session 2 -  E: Linguistics

**Session Chair: **Judith Degen 
**Technical Session Chair: **Jennifer Hu 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

IP29: Pragmatics 2

This session has no scheduled virtual poster presentation time, but attendees will be able to comment and ask questions about your work/research asynchronously throughout the conference. 

**If you are a virtual poster presenter**, you can leave a message in your poster area chat space to advise times (and time zone) that you will be available either in the chat box, or by setting up your own online meeting room (Zoom, etc.). 
**If you are an attendee**, please check each poster's chat box and arrange time with presenter.

Jennifer Culbertson

10

5

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Speakers' cognitive representations of gender and number morphology shape cross-linguistic tendencies in morpheme order

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

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

Innateness, Universals, Diversity

Syntactic harmony arises from a domain-general learning bias

A Cognitive Bias for Cross-Category Word Order Harmony

Infinite use of finite means? Evaluating the generalization of center embedding learned from an artificial grammar

Let's talk (efficiently) about us: Person systems achieve near-optimal compression

Does production facilitate learning morphosyntactic generalisations?

Cognitive biases for word order between numeral, classifier and noun

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