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Topics in Cognitive Science Oct 2018Sociolinguists study the interaction between language and society. Variationist sociolinguistics - the subfield of sociolinguistics which is the focus of this issue -... (Review)
Review
Sociolinguists study the interaction between language and society. Variationist sociolinguistics - the subfield of sociolinguistics which is the focus of this issue - uses empirical and quantitative methods to study the production and perception of linguistic variation. Linguistic variation refers to how speakers choose between linguistic forms that say the same thing in different ways, with the variants differing in their social meaning. For example, how frequently someone says fishin' or fishing depends on a number of factors, such as the speaker's regional and social background and the formality of the speech event. Likewise, if listeners are asked to use a rating scale make judgements about speakers who say fishin' or fishing, their ratings depend on what other social characteristics are attributed to the speaker. This issue aims to reflect the growing number of interactions that bring variationist sociolinguistics into contact of different branches of cognitive science. After presenting current trends in sociolinguistics, we identify five areas of contact between the two fields: cognitive sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic cognition, acquisition of variation, computational modeling, and a comparative approach of variation in animal communication. We then explain the benefits of interdisciplinary work: fostering the study of variability and cultural diversity in cognition; bringing together data and modeling; understanding the cognitive mechanisms through which sociolinguistic variation is processed; examining indexical meaning; exploring links between different levels of grammar; and improving methods of data collection and analysis. Finally we explain how the articles in this issue contribute to each of these benefits. We conclude by suggesting that sociolinguistics holds a strategic position for facing the challenge of building theories of language through integrating its linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects at the collective and individual levels.
Topics: Cognitive Science; Humans; Psycholinguistics; Social Sciences
PubMed: 30294877
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12384 -
Cognition Nov 2018Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is... (Review)
Review
Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is derived from lab-based experiments that are far removed from everyday language use, and that are inspired by questions originating in linguistic and psycholinguistic contexts. In this paper we argue that in order to make progress, the field needs to shift its focus to understanding the neurobiology of naturalistic language comprehension. We present here a new conceptual framework for understanding the neurobiological organization of language comprehension. This framework is non-language-centered in the computational/neurobiological constructs it identifies, and focuses strongly on context. Our core arguments address three general issues: (i) the difficulty in extending language-centric explanations to discourse; (ii) the necessity of taking context as a serious topic of study, modeling it formally and acknowledging the limitations on external validity when studying language comprehension outside context; and (iii) the tenuous status of the language network as an explanatory construct. We argue that adopting this framework means that neurobiological studies of language will be less focused on identifying correlations between brain activity patterns and mechanisms postulated by psycholinguistic theories. Instead, they will be less self-referential and increasingly more inclined towards integration of language with other cognitive systems, ultimately doing more justice to the neurobiological organization of language and how it supports language as it is used in everyday life.
Topics: Brain; Comprehension; Humans; Language; Neurobiology; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 30053570
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.018 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jul 2020There is a rich tradition of building computational models in cognitive science, but modeling, theoretical, and experimental research are not as tightly integrated as... (Review)
Review
There is a rich tradition of building computational models in cognitive science, but modeling, theoretical, and experimental research are not as tightly integrated as they could be. In this paper, we show that computational techniques-even simple ones that are straightforward to use-can greatly facilitate designing, implementing, and analyzing experiments, and generally help lift research to a new level. We focus on the domain of artificial grammar learning, and we give five concrete examples in this domain for (a) formalizing and clarifying theories, (b) generating stimuli, (c) visualization, (d) model selection, and (e) exploring the hypothesis space.
Topics: Cognitive Science; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Neural Networks, Computer; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 31663267
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12474 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2018Miscommunication phenomena such as repair in dialogue are important indicators of the quality of communication. Automatic detection is therefore a key step toward tools...
Miscommunication phenomena such as repair in dialogue are important indicators of the quality of communication. Automatic detection is therefore a key step toward tools that can characterize communication quality and thus help in applications from call center management to mental health monitoring. However, most existing computational linguistic approaches to these phenomena are unsuitable for general use in this way, and particularly for analyzing human-human dialogue: Although models of other-repair are common in human-computer dialogue systems, they tend to focus on specific phenomena (e.g., repair initiation by systems), missing the range of repair and repair initiation forms used by humans; and while self-repair models for speech recognition and understanding are advanced, they tend to focus on removal of "disfluent" material important for full understanding of the discourse contribution, and/or rely on domain-specific knowledge. We explain the requirements for more satisfactory models, including incrementality of processing and robustness to sparsity. We then describe models for self- and other-repair detection that meet these requirements (for the former, an adaptation of an existing repair model; for the latter, an adaptation of standard techniques) and investigate how they perform on datasets from a range of dialogue genres and domains, with promising results.
Topics: Communication; Datasets as Topic; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 29517153
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12324 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2018People give feedback in conversation: both positive signals of understanding, such as nods, and negative signals of misunderstanding, such as frowns. How do signals of...
People give feedback in conversation: both positive signals of understanding, such as nods, and negative signals of misunderstanding, such as frowns. How do signals of understanding and misunderstanding affect the coordination of language use in conversation? Using a chat tool and a maze-based reference task, we test two experimental manipulations that selectively interfere with feedback in live conversation: (a) "Attenuation" that replaces positive signals of understanding such as "right" or "okay" with weaker, more provisional signals such as "errr" or "umm" and (2) "Amplification" that replaces relatively specific signals of misunderstanding from clarification requests such as "on the left?" with generic signals of trouble such as "huh?" or "eh?". The results show that Amplification promotes rapid convergence on more systematic, abstract ways of describing maze locations while Attenuation has no significant effect. We interpret this as evidence that "running repairs"-the processes of dealing with misunderstandings on the fly-are key drivers of semantic coordination in dialogue. This suggests a new direction for experimental work on conversation and a productive way to connect the empirical accounts of Conversation Analysis with the representational and processing concerns of Formal Semantics and Psycholinguistics.
Topics: Adult; Comprehension; Cooperative Behavior; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Psycholinguistics; Psychomotor Performance; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 29687611
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12336 -
NeuroImage. Clinical 2018The behavioural and neural processes underpinning different word classes, particularly nouns and verbs, have been a long-standing area of interest in psycholinguistic,...
The behavioural and neural processes underpinning different word classes, particularly nouns and verbs, have been a long-standing area of interest in psycholinguistic, neuropsychology and aphasiology research. This topic has theoretical implications concerning the organisation of the language system, as well as clinical consequences related to the management of patients with language deficits. Research findings, however, have diverged widely, which might, in part, reflect methodological differences, particularly related to controlling the psycholinguistic variations between nouns and verbs. The first aim of this study, therefore, was to develop a set of neuropsychological tests that assessed single-word production and comprehension with a matched set of nouns and verbs. Secondly, the behavioural profiles and neural correlates of noun and verb processing were explored, based on these novel tests, in a relatively large cohort of 48 patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia. A data-driven approach, principal component analysis (PCA), was also used to determine how noun and verb production and comprehension were related to the patients' underlying fundamental language domains. The results revealed no performance differences between noun and verb production and comprehension once matched on multiple psycholinguistic features including, most critically, imageability. Interestingly, the noun-verb differences found in previous studies were replicated in this study once un-matched materials were used. Lesion-symptom mapping revealed overlapping neural correlates of noun and verb processing along left temporal and parietal regions. These findings support the view that the neural representation of noun and verb processing at single-word level are jointly-supported by distributed cortical regions. The PCA generated five fundamental language and cognitive components of aphasia: phonological production, phonological recognition, semantics, fluency, and executive function. Consistent with the behavioural analyses and lesion-symptom mapping results, both noun and verb processing loaded on common underlying language domains: phonological production and semantics. The neural correlates of these five principal components aligned with existing models of language and the regions implicated by other techniques such as functional neuroimaging and neuro-stimulation.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Analysis of Variance; Aphasia; Association; Cohort Studies; Comprehension; Correlation of Data; Female; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Names; Neuropsychological Tests; Photic Stimulation; Predictive Value of Tests; Principal Component Analysis; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Stroke
PubMed: 29868446
DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2018.01.023 -
Cognition Aug 2021This article first describes Jacques Mehler's initial efforts to make psycholinguistics and, more generally, the cognitive sciences better known during his first years...
This article first describes Jacques Mehler's initial efforts to make psycholinguistics and, more generally, the cognitive sciences better known during his first years in Paris. Two lines of research on sentence perception, that we conducted in collaboration with Jacques, are then presented to illustrate his focus. In the Seventies, sentence perception was a central topic in psycholinguistics, with contrasting proposals of syntactic autonomy and interactivity being confronted. A first series of experiments aimed at defining the role of syntax in lexical selection process as revealed by the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of the words in a sentence. The second series, using the phoneme monitoring technique, examined the clause as a processing unit during the auditory perception of sentences. These results confirm the fundamental role played by syntax in language processing.
Topics: Humans; Language; Paris; Psycholinguistics; Speech Perception
PubMed: 33239178
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104483 -
Memory & Cognition Feb 2018We report data from an experiment in which participants performed immediate serial recall of visually presented words with or without articulatory suppression, while...
We report data from an experiment in which participants performed immediate serial recall of visually presented words with or without articulatory suppression, while also performing homophone or rhyme detection. The separation between homophonous or rhyming pairs in the list was varied. According to the working memory model (Baddeley, 1986; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), suppression should prevent articulatory recoding. Nevertheless, rhyme and homophone detection was well above chance. However, with suppression, participants showed a greater tendency to false-alarm to orthographically related foils (e.g., GIVE-FIVE). This pattern is similar to that observed in short-term memory patients.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Humans; Memory, Short-Term; Mental Recall; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Young Adult
PubMed: 28895111
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-017-0754-8 -
Schizophrenia Research Jul 2018Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that,...
OBJECTIVE
Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness.
METHODS
Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5). We compared groups on variation in pitch (F0), formant F1 and F2, and intensity/loudness.
RESULTS
Regarding pitch variation, patients with aprosody differed significantly from controls in Task 5 in both unadjusted tests and those adjusted for sociodemographics. For the standard deviation (SD) of F1, no significant differences were found in adjusted tests. Regarding SD of F2, patients with aprosody had lower values than controls in Task 3, 4, and 5. For variation in intensity/loudness, patients with aprosody had lower values than patients without aprosody and controls across the five tasks.
CONCLUSIONS
Findings could represent a step toward developing new methods for measuring and tracking the severity of this specific negative symptom using acoustic phonetic parameters; such work is relevant to other psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Male; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Psychotic Disorders; Schizophrenia; Speech Acoustics; Speech Disorders; Speech Production Measurement
PubMed: 29449060
DOI: 10.1016/j.schres.2018.01.007 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Dec 2018Traditional research in bilingualism has consistently found that switching languages is effortful, placing demands on neural systems of cognitive control. This finding... (Review)
Review
Traditional research in bilingualism has consistently found that switching languages is effortful, placing demands on neural systems of cognitive control. This finding runs counter to most bilinguals' intuitive experience. We review a body of recent work showing that, in fact, when bilinguals switch languages voluntarily, both the behavioral cost of switching and the associated recruitment of cognitive control areas are greatly reduced or completely eliminated. This suggests that switching languages is not inherently effortful, but rather, particular communicative demands may make it costly. The new evidence also challenges the basic premise underlying the bilingual advantage hypothesis. We articulate a more nuanced version of it, in which the advantage is limited to bilinguals who frequently switch languages based on external constraints.
Topics: Executive Function; Humans; Multilingualism; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 30449317
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.10.001