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Topics in Cognitive Science Jan 2020This article describes early stages in the acquisition of a first vocabulary by infants and young children. It distinguishes two major stages, the first of which... (Review)
Review
This article describes early stages in the acquisition of a first vocabulary by infants and young children. It distinguishes two major stages, the first of which operates by a stand-alone word-to-world pairing procedure and the second of which, using the evidence so acquired, builds a domain-specific syntax-sensitive structure-to-world pairing procedure. As we show, the first stage of learning is slow, restricted in character, and to some extent errorful, whereas the second procedure is determinative, rapid, and essentially errorless. Our central claim here is that the early, referentially based learning procedure succeeds at all because it is reined in by attention-focusing properties of word-to-world timing and related indicants of referential intent.
Topics: Child, Preschool; Humans; Infant; Language Development; Learning; Psycholinguistics; Vocabulary
PubMed: 29908001
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12352 -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Aug 2020Under a recall model in which presentations and rehearsals are treated as equivalent encoding events, we investigated whether rehearsal efficiency differences explain...
Under a recall model in which presentations and rehearsals are treated as equivalent encoding events, we investigated whether rehearsal efficiency differences explain the effects of word frequency and bilingual proficiency on the temporal dynamics of rehearsal and free recall. Experiments 1 and 3 were conducted with monolingual English speakers, and Experiments 2 and 4 were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals with matched age, education, and socioeconomic status. In Experiments 1 and 2, lower word frequency, lower proficiency, and bilingualism were associated with less accurate free recall of items from early serial positions, beginning recall with items from later serial positions, and making fewer transitions to items from later or adjacent serial positions. These effects were replicated and rehearsal-based explanations were validated in Experiments 3 and 4 using a rehearse-aloud protocol. With lower frequency words or lower language proficiency, rehearsal was less efficient with fewer rehearsals between item presentations. As a result, items from early serial positions had fewer rehearsals that stopped earlier in the study sequence, less spacing between repeated rehearsals, and fewer transitions to items from later or adjacent serial positions. Rehearsal-contingent analyses revealed that these rehearsal patterns were associated with less accurate recall, beginning recall with items from later serial positions, and consistent transition patterns from rehearsal to recall. These patterns support a model in which presentations and rehearsals are treated as equivalent encoding events and the effects of word frequency and language proficiency on recall accuracy are mediated by less efficient rehearsal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Male; Mental Recall; Multilingualism; Practice, Psychological; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 31916838
DOI: 10.1037/xge0000732 -
NeuroImage Oct 2022The efficiency of spoken word recognition is essential for real-time communication. There is consensus that this efficiency relies on an implicit process of activating...
The efficiency of spoken word recognition is essential for real-time communication. There is consensus that this efficiency relies on an implicit process of activating multiple word candidates that compete for recognition as the acoustic signal unfolds in real-time. However, few methods capture the neural basis of this dynamic competition on a msec-by-msec basis. This is crucial for understanding the neuroscience of language, and for understanding hearing, language and cognitive disorders in people for whom current behavioral methods are not suitable. We applied machine-learning techniques to standard EEG signals to decode which word was heard on each trial and analyzed the patterns of confusion over time. Results mirrored psycholinguistic findings: Early on, the decoder was equally likely to report the target (e.g., baggage) or a similar sounding competitor (badger), but by around 500 msec, competitors were suppressed. Follow up analyses show that this is robust across EEG systems (gel and saline), with fewer channels, and with fewer trials. Results are robust within individuals and show high reliability. This suggests a powerful and simple paradigm that can assess the neural dynamics of speech decoding, with potential applications for understanding lexical development in a variety of clinical disorders.
Topics: Electroencephalography; Humans; Psycholinguistics; Recognition, Psychology; Reproducibility of Results; Speech Perception
PubMed: 35842096
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119457 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jan 2022Contemporary psycholinguistic models place significant emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, recognition, and production of language but...
Contemporary psycholinguistic models place significant emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, recognition, and production of language but neglect many issues related to the representation of language-related information in the mental lexicon. In contrast, a central tenet of network science is that the structure of a network influences the processes that operate in that system, making process and representation inextricably connected. Here, we consider how the structure found across phonological networks of several languages from different language families may influence language processing as we age and experience diseases that affect cognition during the typical and atypical acquisition of new words, during typical perception and production of speech in adults, and during language change over time. We conclude that the network science approach may not only provide insights into specific language processes but also provide a way to connect the work from these domains, which are becoming increasingly balkanized.
Topics: Adult; Cognition; Humans; Language; Models, Psychological; Neural Networks, Computer; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Recognition, Psychology; Speech; Speech Perception
PubMed: 33836120
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12532 -
Cognitive Science Dec 2019Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different...
Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three-party conversation. Analyses of referential form-expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate-in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge-scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to-be-designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees.
Topics: Communication; Female; Humans; Male; Psycholinguistics; Students; Young Adult
PubMed: 31858629
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12807 -
PloS One 2022This study presents normative data in Kannada for 180 coloured Snodgrass & Vanderwart pictures. Data are presented for naming latency, image agreement, picture-name...
This study presents normative data in Kannada for 180 coloured Snodgrass & Vanderwart pictures. Data are presented for naming latency, image agreement, picture-name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition (AoA). Sixty-eight native Kannada speaking adults completed all tasks. The effects of the rated variables on naming latency were examined and compared with data on the same variables in other languages. A regression analysis revealed that image agreement, name agreement, familiarity, and age of acquisition all had a significant impact on naming latency, while visual complexity and frequency did not. Although, the correlations among rated variables in Kannada were equivalent to previous normative studies, the cross-linguistic comparison revealed that only AoA was strongly correlated with other studies. The findings point to the importance of understanding the interplay of psycholinguistic variables on naming latency in different languages.
Topics: Language; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Recognition, Psychology; Visual Perception
PubMed: 35381039
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266359 -
Language and Speech Sep 2022A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have...
A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.
Topics: Female; Humans; Male; New Zealand; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 34743645
DOI: 10.1177/00238309211053033 -
Quarterly Journal of Experimental... Nov 2016Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response...
Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also unclear. The current research uses a rating task to investigate the influence of textual devices (emoticons and punctuation marks) on the comprehension of, and emotional responses to, sarcastic versus literal criticism and praise, for both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) materials. Results showed that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic praise was rated as less positive than literal praise, suggesting that sarcasm serves to mute the positive or negative nature of the message. In terms of textual devices, results showed that emoticons had a larger influence on both comprehension and emotional impact than punctuation marks.
Topics: Adolescent; Comprehension; Emotions; Female; Humans; Male; Metaphor; Personal Construct Theory; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Social Behavior; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 26513274
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1106566 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jul 2018Signs and symbols relate to concepts and can be used to speak about objects, actions, and their features. Theories of semantic grounding address the question how the...
Signs and symbols relate to concepts and can be used to speak about objects, actions, and their features. Theories of semantic grounding address the question how the latter two, concepts and real-world entities, come into play and interlink in symbol learning. Here, a neurobiological model is used to spell out concrete mechanisms of symbol grounding, which implicate the "association" of information about sign and referents and, at the same time, the extraction of semantic features and the formation of abstract representations best described as conjoined and disjoined feature sets that may or may not have a real-life equivalent. The mechanistic semantic circuits carrying these feature sets are not static conceptual entries, but exhibit rich activation dynamics related to memory, prediction, and contextual modulation. Four key issues in specifying these activation dynamics will be highlighted: (a) the inner structure of semantic circuits, (b) mechanisms of semantic priming, (c) task specificity in semantic activation, and (d) context-dependent semantic circuit activation in the processing of referential, existential, and universal statements. These linguistic-semantic examples show that specific mechanisms are required to account for context-dependent semantic function or conceptual "flexibility." Static context-independent concepts as such are insufficient to account for these different semantic functions. Whereas abstract amodal models of concepts did so far not spell out concrete mechanisms for context-dependent semantic function, neuronal assembly mechanisms offer a workable perspective.
Topics: Association Learning; Cerebral Cortex; Concept Formation; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 30129710
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12367 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jan 2020Understanding and acquiring language involve mapping language onto conceptual representations. Nevertheless, several issues remain unresolved with respect to (a) how...
Understanding and acquiring language involve mapping language onto conceptual representations. Nevertheless, several issues remain unresolved with respect to (a) how such mappings are performed, and (b) whether conceptual representations are susceptible to cross-linguistic influences. In this article, we discuss these issues focusing on the domain of evidentiality and sources of knowledge. Empirical evidence in this domain yields growing support for the proposal that linguistic categories of evidentiality are tightly linked to, build on, and reflect conceptual representations of sources of knowledge that are shared across speakers of different languages.
Topics: Child Development; Child, Preschool; Cognition; Concept Formation; Humans; Knowledge; Language; Language Development; Psycholinguistics; Theory of Mind
PubMed: 29932304
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12355