Mathilde Josserand, François Pellegrino, Oxana Grosseck, Dan Dediu, Limor Raviv
{"title":"Adapting to Individual Differences: An Experimental Study of Language Evolution in Heterogeneous Populations","authors":"Mathilde Josserand, François Pellegrino, Oxana Grosseck, Dan Dediu, Limor Raviv","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70011","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Variations in language abilities, use, and production style are ubiquitous within any given population. While research on language evolution has traditionally overlooked the potential importance of such individual differences, these can have an important impact on the trajectory of language evolution and ongoing change. To address this gap, we use a group communication game for studying this mechanism in the lab, in which micro-societies of interacting participants develop and use artificial languages to successfully communicate with each other. Importantly, one participant in the group is assigned a keyboard with a limited inventory of letters (simulating a speech impairment that individuals may encounter in real life), forcing them to communicate differently than the rest. We test how languages evolve in such heterogeneous groups and whether they adapt to accommodate the unique characteristics of individuals with language idiosyncrasies. Our results suggest that language evolves differently in groups where some individuals have distinct language abilities, eliciting more innovative elements at the cost of reduced communicative success and convergence. Furthermore, we observed strong partner-specific accommodation to the minority individual, which carried over to the group level. Importantly, the degree of group-wide adaptation was not uniform and depended on participants’ attachment to established language forms. Our findings provide compelling evidence that individual differences can permeate and accumulate within a linguistic community, ultimately driving changes in languages over time. They also underscore the importance of integrating individual differences into future research on language evolution.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142583744","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}
Josué García-Arch, Solenn Friedrich, Xiongbo Wu, David Cucurell, Lluís Fuentemilla
{"title":"Beyond the Positivity Bias: The Processing and Integration of Self-Relevant Feedback Is Driven by Its Alignment With Pre-Existing Self-Views.","authors":"Josué García-Arch, Solenn Friedrich, Xiongbo Wu, David Cucurell, Lluís Fuentemilla","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Our self-concept is constantly faced with self-relevant information. Prevailing research suggests that information's valence plays a central role in shaping our self-views. However, the need for stability within the self-concept structure and the inherent alignment of positive feedback with the pre-existing self-views of healthy individuals might mask valence and congruence effects. In this study (N = 30, undergraduates), we orthogonalized feedback valence and self-congruence effects to examine the behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of self-relevant feedback processing and self-concept updating. We found that participants had a preference for integrating self-congruent and dismissing self-incongruent feedback, regardless of its valence. Consistently, electroencephalography results revealed that feedback congruence, but not feedback valence, is rapidly detected during early processing stages. Our findings diverge from the accepted notion that self-concept updating is based on the selective incorporation of positive information. These findings offer novel insights into self-concept dynamics, with implications for the understanding of psychopathological conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":"e70017"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142669475","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}
Lauren Fletcher, Hugh Rabagliati, Jennifer Culbertson
{"title":"Autistic Traits, Communicative Efficiency, and Social Biases Shape Language Learning in Autistic and Allistic Learners","authors":"Lauren Fletcher, Hugh Rabagliati, Jennifer Culbertson","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70007","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There is ample evidence that individual-level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the languages of the world. However, such research often assumes homogeneity among language learners and users, or at least does not dig into individual differences in behavior. Yet, it is increasingly clear that language users vary in a large number of ways: in culture, in demographics, and—critically for present purposes—in terms of cognitive diversity. Here, we explore how neurodiversity impacts behavior in an experimental task similar to the one summarized above, and how this behavior interacts with social pressures. We find both similarities and differences between autistic and nonautistic English-speaking individuals, suggesting that neurodiversity can impact language change in the lab. This, in turn, highlights the potential for future research on the role of neurodivergent populations in language evolution more generally.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142523383","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":"Of Mouses and Mans: A Test of Errorless Versus Error-Based Learning in Children","authors":"Megan Waller, Daniel Yurovsky, Nazbanou Nozari","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70006","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For both adults and children, learning from one's mistakes (error-based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., “mice”) as a test case, we conducted a corpus analysis (<i>N</i> = 227) and two preregistered experiments (<i>N</i> = 56, <i>N</i> = 99), to investigate the potency of error-based learning as a mechanism for language acquisition in 3- and 4-year-old children. The results of the corpus analysis showed that incidental feedback after errors, in the form of caregivers’ reformulations of children's errors, was relatively infrequent, had modest informational value, and was rarely used by children to correct their errors immediately. The following two experiments contrasted error-based learning with errorless learning, where the correct utterance was modeled for the child before a potential error was committed. The results showed that error-based learning was not always effective, and when it was, it was certainly not superior to errorless learning. Collectively, these findings question the extension of the benefits of error-based learning from pedagogical to nonpedagogical settings and define constraints under which one mechanism may be more beneficial to learning than the other.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142523385","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":"Complex Words as Shortest Paths in the Network of Lexical Knowledge","authors":"Sergei Monakhov, Holger Diessel","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70005","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Lexical models diverge on the question of how to represent complex words. Under the morpheme-based approach, each morpheme is treated as a separate unit, while under the word-based approach, morphological structure is derived from complex words. In this paper, we propose a new computational model of morphology that is based on graph theory and is intended to elaborate the word-based network approach. Specifically, we use a key concept of network science, the notion of shortest path, to investigate how complex words are learned, stored, and processed. The notion of shortest path refers to the task of finding the shortest or most optimal path connecting two non-adjacent nodes in a network. Building on this notion, the current study shows (i) that new complex words can be segmented into morphemes through the shortest path analysis; (ii) that attested English words tend to represent the shortest paths in the morphological network; and (iii) that novel (unattested) words receive higher acceptability ratings in experiments when they are formed along established optimal paths. The model's performance is tested in two experiments with human participants as well as against the behavioral data from the English Lexicon Project. We interpret our empirical results from the perspective of a usage-based model of grammar and argue that network science provides a powerful tool for analyzing language structure.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142510506","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}
Jessica Nieder, Ruben van de Vijver, Adam Ussishkin
{"title":"Emerging Roots: Investigating Early Access to Meaning in Maltese Auditory Word Recognition","authors":"Jessica Nieder, Ruben van de Vijver, Adam Ussishkin","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70004","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Semitic languages, the consonantal root is central to morphology, linking form and meaning. While psycholinguistic studies highlight its importance in language processing, the role of meaning in early lexical access and its representation remain unclear. This study investigates when meaning becomes accessible during the processing of Maltese verb forms, using a computational model based on the Discriminative Lexicon framework. Our model effectively comprehends and produces Maltese verbs, while also predicting response times in a masked auditory priming experiment. Results show that meaning is accessible early in lexical access and becomes more prominent after the target word is fully processed. This suggests that semantic information plays a critical role from the initial stages of lexical access, refining our understanding of real-time language comprehension. Our findings contribute to theories of lexical access and offer valuable insights for designing priming studies in psycholinguistics. Additionally, this study demonstrates the potential of computational models in investigating the relationship between form and meaning in language processing.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142523384","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}
Thomas Hörberg, Murathan Kurfalı, Maria Larsson, Erika Jonsson Laukka, Pawel Herman, Jonas K. Olofsson
{"title":"A Rose by Another Name? Odor Misnaming is Associated with Linguistic Properties","authors":"Thomas Hörberg, Murathan Kurfalı, Maria Larsson, Erika Jonsson Laukka, Pawel Herman, Jonas K. Olofsson","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70003","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Naming common odors is a surprisingly difficult task: Odors are frequently misnamed. Little is known about the linguistic properties of odor misnamings. We test whether odor misnamings of old adults carry information about olfactory perception and its connection to lexical-semantic processing. We analyze the olfactory–semantic content of odor source naming failures in a large sample of older adults in Sweden (<i>n</i> = 2479; age 58–100 years). We investigate whether linguistic factors and semantic proximity to the target odor name predict how odors are misnamed, and how these factors relate to overall odor identification performance. We also explore the primary semantic dimensions along which misnamings are distributed. We find that odor misnamings consist of surprisingly many vague and unspecific terms, such as category names (e.g., <i>fruit</i>) or abstract or evaluative terms (e.g., <i>sweet</i>). Odor misnamings are often strongly associated with the correct name, capturing properties such as its category or other abstract features. People are also biased toward misnaming odors with high-frequency terms that are associated with olfaction or gustation. Linguistic properties of odor misnamings and their semantic proximity to the target odor name predict odor identification performance, suggesting that linguistic processing facilitates odor identification. Further, odor misnamings constitute an olfactory–semantic space that is similar to the olfactory vocabulary of English. This space is primarily differentiated along pleasantness, edibility, and concreteness dimensions. Odor naming failures thus contain plenty of information about semantic odor knowledge.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142510504","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}
Neele Engelmann, Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Felipe Oliveira de Sousa, Karolina Prochownik, Ivar R. Hannikainen, Noel Struchiner, Stefan Magen
{"title":"Apply the Laws, if They are Good: Moral Evaluations Linearly Predict Whether Judges Should Enforce the Law","authors":"Neele Engelmann, Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Felipe Oliveira de Sousa, Karolina Prochownik, Ivar R. Hannikainen, Noel Struchiner, Stefan Magen","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70001","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since “the law is the law?” Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (<i>N</i> = 167) and people with some legal training (<i>N</i> = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people's subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is most pronounced among individuals who endorse natural law (i.e., the legal-philosophical view that immoral laws are not valid laws at all), and is attenuated when disagreement about the moral status of a law is considered reasonable. The relationship is equally strong for laypeople and for those with legal training. We situate our findings within the broader context of morality's influence on legal reasoning that experimental jurisprudence has uncovered in recent years, and consider normative implications.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142510505","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":"Grasping the Concept of an Object at a Glance: Category Information Accessed by Brief Dichoptic Presentation","authors":"Caitlyn Antal, Roberto G. de Almeida","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70002","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What type of conceptual information about an object do we get at a brief glance? In two experiments, we investigated the nature of conceptual tokening—the moment at which conceptual information about an object is accessed. Using a masked picture-word congruency task with dichoptic presentations at “brief” (50−60 ms) and “long” (190−200 ms) durations, participants judged the relation between a picture (e.g., a banana) and a word representing one of four property types about the object: superordinate (<i>fruit</i>), basic level (<i>banana</i>), a high-salient (<i>yellow</i>), or low-salient feature (<i>peel</i>). In Experiment 1, stimuli were presented in black-and-white; in Experiment 2, they were presented in red and blue, with participants wearing red-blue anaglyph glasses. This manipulation allowed for the independent projection of stimuli to the left- and right-hemisphere visual areas, aiming to probe the early effects of these projections in conceptual tokening. Results showed that superordinate and basic-level properties elicited faster and more accurate responses than high- and low-salient features at both presentation times. This advantage persisted even when the objects were divided into categories (e.g., <i>animals</i>, <i>vegetables, vehicles, tools</i>), and when objects contained high-salient visual features. However, contrasts between categories show that <i>animals</i>, <i>fruits</i>, and <i>vegetables</i> tend to be categorized at the superordinate level, while <i>vehicles</i> tend to be categorized at the basic level. Also, for a restricted class of objects, high-salient features representing diagnostic color information (<i>yellow</i> for the picture of a banana) facilitated congruency judgments to the same extent as that of superordinate and basic-level labels. We suggest that early access to object concepts yields superordinate and basic-level information, with features only yielding effects at a later stage of processing, unless they represent diagnostic color information. We discuss these results advancing a unified theory of conceptual representation, integrating key postulates of atomism and feature-based theories.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477997","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}
Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Sarah Stilwell, Susan A. Gelman
{"title":"Developing Concepts of Authenticity: Insights From Parents’ and Children's Conversations About Historical Significance","authors":"Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Sarah Stilwell, Susan A. Gelman","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70000","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The present study investigated children's understanding that an object's history may increase its significance, an appreciation that underpins the concept of <i>historical authenticity</i> (i.e., the idea that an item's history determines its true identity, beyond its functional or material qualities, leading people to value real items over copies or fakes). We examined the development of historical significance through the lens of parent–child conversations, and children's performance on an authenticity assessment. The final sample was American, 79.2% monoracial White, and mid-high socio-economic status (SES) and included 48 parent–child pairs: 24 with younger children (<i>R</i> = 3.5 to 4.5 years) and 24 with older children (<i>R</i> = 5.5 to 6.5 years). Parent–child pairs discussed three books we created, with three storylines: a museum (culturally authentic) storyline, a clean-up (personally authentic) storyline, and a control storyline. Across measures, conversations suggested that authenticity may begin as a “placeholder concept” that is initially rooted in a broad appreciation for the significance of old objects and only later filled in with specifics. This placeholder initially directs children's learning about authenticity by linking, in an unspecified way, the value and significance of objects to their past. For example, we found that young children appropriately appealed to history (vs. perceptual or functional features of objects) in contexts regarding authentic objects but struggled in determining which objects were more significant on the post-test assessment, suggesting that they attend to object history but are not yet sure how histories matter for making authenticity judgments. We also found some evidence that directing children's attention toward conceptual information related to object history may in turn direct them away from material or perceptual considerations, as seen in trade-offs in parents’ and children's conversations. Together, this exploratory report offers many new avenues for work on the development of authenticity concepts in childhood.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"48 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477996","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}