Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"Semantic and Phonological Prediction in Language Comprehension: Pretarget Attraction Toward Semantic and Phonological Competitors in a Mouse Tracking Task","authors":"Wenting Ye,&nbsp;Qingqing Qu","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent evidence increasingly suggests that comprehenders are capable of generating probabilistic predictions about forthcoming linguistic inputs during language comprehension. However, it remains debated whether language comprehenders predict low-level word forms and whether they always make predictions. In this study, we investigated semantic and phonological prediction in high- and low-constraining sentence contexts, utilizing the mouse-tracking paradigm to trace mouse movement trajectories. Mandarin Chinese speakers listened to high- and low-constraining sentences which resulted in high and low predictability for the critical target words. While listening, participants viewed a visual display featuring two objects: one corresponding to the critical target word (the target object) and the other being either semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated to the target word. Participants were instructed to click on the target object. The analysis of mouse movement trajectories revealed two key findings: (1) In both high- and low-constraining contexts, there was a spatial attraction of the cursor toward semantic competitors, notably occurring before the target word was heard; (2) there are indications that phonological pretarget attraction effects were observed primarily in high-constraining contexts. These findings suggest that the constraints of sentences have the potential to modulate the representational contents of linguistic prediction during language comprehension. Methodologically, the mouse-tracking paradigm presents a promising tool for further exploration of linguistic prediction.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143638721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings","authors":"Marco Ciapparelli,&nbsp;Calogero Zarbo,&nbsp;Marco Marelli","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70048","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT-base and Llama-2-13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into constituent meanings (“snow,” “man”), which are then connected by an implicit semantic relation selected from a set of possible competitors (FOR, <span>MADE</span> <span>OF</span>, BY, …) to obtain a plausible interpretation (“man MADE OF snow”). Here, we leverage the flexibility of LLMs to obtain contextualized representations for both target compounds (e.g., “snowman”) and their implicit interpretations (e.g., “man MADE OF snow”). We demonstrate that replacing a compound with a paraphrased version leads to changes to the embeddings that are inversely proportional to the paraphrase's plausibility, estimated by human raters. While this relation holds for both existing and novel compounds, results obtained for novel compounds are substantially weaker, and older distributional models outperform LLMs. Nonetheless, the present results show that LLMs can offer a valid approximation of the internal structure of compound words posited by cognitive theories, thus representing a promising tool to model word senses that are at once implicit and possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143617649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Modeling How Suffixes Are Learned in Infancy","authors":"Canaan M. Breiss,&nbsp;Bruce P. Hayes,&nbsp;Megha Sundara,&nbsp;Mark E. Johnson","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70047","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent experimental work offers evidence that infants become aware of suffixes at a remarkably early age, as early as 6 months for the English suffix -<i>s</i>. Here, we seek to understand this ability though the strategy of computational modeling. We evaluate a set of distributional learning models for their ability to mimic the observed acquisition order for various suffixes when trained on a corpus of child-directed speech. Our best-performing model first segments utterances of the corpus into candidate words, thus populating a proto-lexicon. It then searches the proto-lexicon to discover affixes, making use of two distributional heuristics that we call Terminus Frequency and Parse Reliability. With suitable parameter settings, this model is able to mimic the order of acquisition of several suffixes, as established in experimental work. In contrast, models that attempt to spot affixes within utterances, without reference to words, consistently fail. Specifically, they fail to match acquisition order, and they extract implausible pseudo-affixes from single words of high token frequency, as in [pi-] from <i>peekaboo</i>. Our modeling results thus suggest that affix learning proceeds hierarchically, with word discovery providing the essential basis for affix discovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143617650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Opening Social Interactions: The Coordination of Approach, Gaze, Speech, and Handshakes During Greetings","authors":"Ottilie Tilston,&nbsp;Judith Holler,&nbsp;Adrian Bangerter","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite the importance of greetings for opening social interactions, their multimodal coordination processes remain poorly understood. We used a naturalistic, lab-based setup where pairs of unacquainted participants approached and greeted each other while unaware their greeting behavior was studied. We measured the prevalence and time course of multimodal behaviors potentially culminating in a handshake, including motor behaviors (e.g., walking, standing up, hand movements like raise, grasp, and retraction), gaze patterns (using eye tracking glasses), and speech (close and distant verbal salutations). We further manipulated the visibility of partners’ eyes to test its effect on gaze. Our findings reveal that gaze to a partner's face increases over the course of a greeting, but is partly averted during approach and is influenced by the visibility of partners’ eyes. Gaze helps coordinate handshakes, by signaling intent and guiding the grasp. The timing of adjacency pairs in verbal salutations is comparable to the precision of floor transitions in the main body of conversations, and varies according to greeting phase, with distant salutation pair parts featuring more gaps and close salutation pair parts featuring more overlap. Gender composition and a range of multimodal behaviors affect whether pairs chose to shake hands or not. These findings fill several gaps in our understanding of greetings and provide avenues for future research, including advancements in social robotics and human−robot interaction.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143489867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gesture Reduces Mapping Difficulties in the Development of Spatial Language Depending on the Complexity of Spatial Relations","authors":"Ercenur Ünal,&nbsp;Kevser Kırbaşoğlu,&nbsp;Dilay Z. Karadöller,&nbsp;Beyza Sümer,&nbsp;Aslı Özyürek","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to <i>in</i> and <i>on</i> emerge earlier than those similar to <i>front</i> and <i>behind</i>, followed by <i>left</i> and <i>right</i>. This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by different locative terms. An additional possibility is that children may be delayed in expressing certain spatial meanings partly due to difficulties in discovering the mappings between locative terms in speech and spatial relation they express. We investigate cognitive and mapping difficulties in the domain of spatial language by comparing how children map spatial meanings onto speech versus visually motivated forms in co-speech gesture across different spatial relations. Twenty-four 8-year-old and 23 adult native Turkish-speakers described four-picture displays where the target picture depicted in-on, front-behind, or left-right relations between objects. As the complexity of spatial relations increased, children were more likely to rely on gestures as opposed to speech to informatively express the spatial relation. Adults overwhelmingly relied on speech to informatively express the spatial relation, and this did not change across the complexity of spatial relations. Nevertheless, even when spatial expressions in both speech and co-speech gesture were considered, children lagged behind adults when expressing the most complex left-right relations. These findings suggest that cognitive development and mapping difficulties introduced by the modality of expressions interact in shaping the development of spatial language.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143481465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Negation in First Language Acquisition: Universal or Language-Specific?","authors":"Sakine Çabuk-Ballı,&nbsp;Jekaterina Mazara,&nbsp;Aylin C. Küntay,&nbsp;Birgit Hellwig,&nbsp;Barbara B. Pfeiler,&nbsp;Paul Widmer,&nbsp;Sabine Stoll","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of first language learners. Here, we investigate whether universal or language-specific cues are more relevant for the acquisition process. We test to what extent frequency and salience features (morphosyntactic boundedness, position of the negation marker, allomorphy) influence the acquisition of negation. We use naturalistic longitudinal data from 17 children (age 24–36 months) learning nine typologically maximally diverse languages spoken in very diverse cultural contexts ranging from western urban to subsistence farming: Chintang, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Qaqet, Russian, Sesotho, Turkish, and Yucatec Mayan. Distributional analyses show that the amount and type of input of negation that children hear vary considerably across cultures. Despite significant differences in the input that children receive, we observe a universal pattern in the acquisition of negation: Children transition from relatively easy and salient free negators to less salient bound negator morphemes in their use of negation. Our results show that frequency and morphosyntactic boundedness explain the development of flexibility in the acquisition of negation across all of the nine languages. We further find that the developmental path is shaped by the interaction between frequency and language-specific parameters of salience that are contingent on grammatical features of negation marking in different languages, such as the position of the negation marker and allomorphic variation. Our language-specific findings highlight cross-linguistic variation, which reflects cross-cultural differences in the amount of input of negative utterances children receive. Taken together, this study provides cross-linguistic evidence for the acquisition of negation and emphasizes the interplay of universal and language-specific factors in the acquisition process.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143481545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dynamicity Predicts Inferred Temporal Order in Complex Sentences: Evidence from English, German, and Polish","authors":"Elena Marx,&nbsp;Oliwia Iwan,&nbsp;Eva Wittenberg","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70038","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70038","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To build an accurate mental model of complex situations, people infer temporal order from sometimes underspecified linguistic information. The basis on which these inferences are drawn is an open question. While previous literature has focused on the role of linguistic structure and discourse pragmatic strategies as important contributors to temporal inferences, here we argue that, under uncertainty, people also use the dynamic properties of the described situations to derive temporal order from language. In three pre-registered studies using English, German, and Polish, adult participants used toys to act out complex situations described by main clause-relative clause structures. We consistently find that non-dynamic state descriptions are temporally ordered first, if the other clause describes a dynamic event. This pattern arises independently of whether dynamicity differences are lexically encoded, like in English or German, or grammatically encoded, like in Polish. More generally, our findings address an important gap in the discussion on the role of eventuality type for temporal inference. While there is substantial research on the significance of telicity and durativity, a third, much more overlooked feature is dynamicity, a concept rooted in event perception, not language. Our results therefore provide a crucial thread to closely weave together language comprehension and event cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143417115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Size-Sound Iconicity in English-Like Pseudowords Influences Referent Labeling and Prosody","authors":"Leonardo Michelini,&nbsp;Lynne C. Nygaard","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Speech sounds can communicate perceptual information through iconicity, or shared resemblance between sound and meaning. Prosody, which encompasses vocal characteristics such as pitch and intensity, can similarly be recruited to communicate meaning by evoking physical features of a referent. This study used English-like pseudowords to investigate whether iconicity between word form and object properties would affect pronunciation, with the prediction that congruent mappings between label and referent would elicit similarly iconic prosodic modulation. Experiment 1 used size-sound iconicity to establish perceptual mappings. Participants were presented with three animal figures of varying sizes, small, medium, and big, and asked to assign a label to one of them. The labels were pseudowords designed to be small-sounding, ambiguous with respect to size, or big-sounding. We found that small-sounding pseudowords were more likely to be matched to small referents, and big-sounding pseudowords to big referents. Participants exhibited no preference when naming medium-sized animals. Experiment 2 assessed how iconic mappings between labels and referents influenced vocal production. Participants were shown three animals of differing sizes along with a label that was preassigned to a particular referent. Participants were then asked to pronounce aloud the target pseudoword, and responses were recorded. Although the relationship between label and referent did not significantly predict the acoustic form of vocal productions, participants instead produced prosody that reflected the size evoked by the pseudowords themselves, suggesting that not only are language users sensitive to sound to size iconicity in spoken language, but that sensitivity modulates speech production.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143380716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ACKNOWLEDGING THE GAP WHILE BRIDGING IT: The Experimental Versus Theoretical Divide on the Cognitive Science Study of Language","authors":"Zhuosi Luo","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In recent years, the intersection of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics has gained considerable attention in studies on the cognitive science of language. However, a significant gap still persists between advanced theoretical models and current experimental research capabilities. This study examines this divide, highlighting examples across various linguistic subfields and proposing potential approaches to bridge the gap.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143111676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Do You Control Your Unconscious Action Impulses?","authors":"Yongchun Wang,&nbsp;Mingxiang Li,&nbsp;Meng Zou,&nbsp;Yunfei Gao,&nbsp;Jinlan Cao,&nbsp;Zhengqi Tang,&nbsp;Yonghui Wang","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70041","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A crucial aspect of self-control is the voluntary inhibition of impulsive actions. Stimuli can elicit impulses (or preparation) to act not only in the presence but also in the absence of perceptual awareness, but whether people control action impulses elicited by unconscious stimuli remains unclear. This study used a masked prime version of the Go/NoGo/Free task and combined mathematical modeling of behavioral data to investigate whether people control the unconscious action impulses. In the experiment, when the subliminal prime stimulus triggers the unconscious action impulse, participants need to freely decide whether or not to perform the action. The results showed that the no-response rate was higher in Go-prime free-choice trials than in NoGo-prime free-choice trials, and there were marginally larger negative drift rates in the former than in the latter. The results suggest that people are more likely to make inhibitory decisions about unconscious action impulses. This finding provides support for a framework that extends the feedback loop model of intentional inhibition.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143081552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}