Language Reflects “Core” Cognition: A New Theory About the Origin of Cross-Linguistic Regularities

Semantic processing of argument structure during naturalistic story listening: Evidence from computational modeling on fMRI

A long-standing theoretical debate exists in linguistics concerning argument structure processing, with separationism focusing on syntactic structure and projectionism on semantic properties. To investigate whether argument structure processing is primarily influenced by syntactic structure or semantic properties, this study employed integrative neurocomputational modeling to link brain functions with explicitly defined computational models. We analyzed naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from participants listening to a story, with a focus on subject noun phrase + verb chunks. The methodological framework integrated a general linear model (GLM) analysis of the fMRI data with computational modeling using natural language processing algorithms. These components were integrated using representational similarity analysis (RSA), allowing us to assess the relatedness of two symbolic computational models-one relying on syntactic information from parse trees and the other based on semantic selectional preference information of verbs-to brain activities. The GLM analysis identified significant neural correlates of argument structure processing largely consistent with previous findings, including the precuneus, the right superior temporal gyrus, and the right middle temporal gyrus. Some deviations from previous studies likely reflect the naturalistic nature of the stimuli and our contrast design. The RSA results favored the model utilizing semantic information-a finding further supported by effects observed in brain regions associated with argument structure processing in the literature and by an additional RSA comparing constructions with varying levels of transitivity. These findings suggest that during naturalistic story listening, humans rely heavily on semantic information to interpret argument structure. This study demonstrates an alternative method to engage with the debate on argument structure, highlighting a collaborative effort between theoretical, neuroscientific, and computational linguistics.

A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults

In humans, simple 2D visual displays of launching events ("Michottean launches") can evoke the impression of causality. Direct launching events are regarded as causal, but similar events with a temporal and/or spatial gap between the movements of the two objects, as non-causal. This ability to distinguish between causal and non-causal events is perceptual in nature and develops early and preverbally in infancy. In the present study we investigated the evolutionary origins of this phenomenon and tested whether Guinea baboons (Papio papio) perceive causality in launching events. We used a novel paradigm which was designed to distinguish between the use of causality and the use of spatiotemporal properties. Our results indicate that Guinea baboons successfully discriminate between different Michottean events, but we did not find a learning advantage for a categorisation based on causality as was the case for human adults. Our results imply that, contrary to humans, baboons focused on the spatial and temporal gaps to achieve accurate categorisation, but not on causality per se. Understanding how animals perceive causality is important to figure out whether non-human animals comprehend events similarly to humans. Our study hints at a different manner of processing physical causality for Guinea baboons and human adults.

Cognitive development: The origins of structured thought in the mind

Linguistic syntax lets us communicate complex, structured thoughts, like whether a dog chased a man or vice versa. New work shows that seven-month-olds can entertain such structured thoughts even before acquiring their native language, revealing the origins of this sophisticated ability.

Asymmetries in encoding event roles: Evidence from language and cognition

It has long been hypothesized that the linguistic structure of events, including event participants and their relative prominence, draws on the non-linguistic nature of events and the roles that these events license. However, the precise relation between the prominence of event participants in language and cognition has not been tested experimentally in a systematic way. Here we address this gap. In four experiments, we investigate the relative prominence of (animate) Agents, Patients, Goals and Instruments in the linguistic encoding of complex events and the prominence of these event roles in cognition as measured by visual search and change blindness tasks. The relative prominence of these event roles was largely similar-though not identical-across linguistic and non-linguistic measures. Across linguistic and non-linguistic tasks, Patients were more salient than Goals, which were more salient than Instruments. (Animate) Agents were more salient than Patients in linguistic descriptions and visual search; however, this asymmetrical pattern did not emerge in change detection. Overall, our results reveal homologies between the linguistic and non-linguistic prominence of individual event participants, thereby lending support to the claim that the linguistic structure of events builds on underlying conceptual event representations. We discuss implications of these findings for linguistic theory and theories of event cognition.

Divisive language

What language devises, it might divide. By exploring the relations among the core geometries of the physical world, the abstract geometry of Euclid, and language, I give new insight into both the persistence of core knowledge into adulthood and our access to it through language. My extension of Spelke's language argument has implications for pedagogy, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

A universal preference for animate agents in hominids

When conversing, humans instantaneously predict meaning from fragmentary and ambiguous mspeech, long before utterance completion. They do this by integrating priors (initial assumptions about the world) with contextual evidence to rapidly decide on the most likely meaning. One powerful prior is attentional preference for agents, which biases sentence processing but universally so only if agents are animate. Here, we investigate the evolutionary origins of this preference, by allowing chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, human children, and adults to freely choose between agents and patients in still images, following video clips depicting their dyadic interaction. All participants preferred animate (and occasionally inanimate) agents, although the effect was attenuated if patients were also animate. The findings suggest that a preference for animate agents evolved before language and is not reducible to simple perceptual biases. To conclude, both humans and great apes prefer animate agents in decision tasks, echoing a universal prior in human language processing.

A Phone in a Basket Looks Like a Knife in a Cup: Role-Filler Independence in Visual Processing

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and "fillers" of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higher-level reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in force-dynamic relations-e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target's relational category than to those that did not-even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers.

The Representation of Giving Actions: Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships

Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species' preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X). We argue that this asymmetry, echoed in language, reveals the operations of a mechanism of event construction where participant roles are encoded only when they are crucial to rendering an action teleologically well-formed. We show that such a representation of giving allows people to monitor the direction (who gave to whom) and kind (what was given) of resource transfer within a dyad, suggesting that giving may be interpreted as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. As this research suggests, advancing the study of the prelinguistic representation of giving has implications for cognitive linguistics, by clarifying the relation between event participants and syntactic arguments, as well as social cognition, by identifying which kinds of relational inferences people draw from attending to acts of sharing.

Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory

The ability to maintain events (i.e., interactions between/among objects) in working memory is crucial for our everyday cognition, yet the format of this representation is poorly understood. The current ERP study was designed to answer two questions: How is maintaining events (e.g., the tiger hit the lion) neurally different from maintaining item coordinations (e.g., the tiger and the lion)? That is, how is the event relation (present in events but not coordinations) represented? And how is the agent, or initiator of the event encoded differently from the patient, or receiver of the event during maintenance? We used a novel picture-sentence match-across-delay approach in which the working memory representation was "pinged" during the delay, replicated across two ERP experiments with Chinese and English materials. We found that maintenance of events elicited a long-lasting late sustained difference in posterior-occipital electrodes relative to non-events. This effect resembled the negative slow wave reported in previous studies of working memory, suggesting that the maintenance of events in working memory may impose a higher cost compared to coordinations. Although we did not observe significant ERP differences associated with pinging the agent vs. the patient during the delay, we did find that the ping appeared to dampen the ongoing sustained difference, suggesting a shift from sustained activity to activity silent mechanisms. These results suggest a new method by which ERPs can be used to elucidate the format of neural representation for events in working memory.

Compositionality in visual perception

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional - just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

Précis of What Babies Know

Where does human knowledge begin? Research on human infants, children, adults, and nonhuman animals, using diverse methods from the cognitive, brain, and computational sciences, provides evidence for six early emerging, domain-specific systems of core knowledge. These automatic, unconscious systems are situated between perceptual systems and systems of explicit concepts and beliefs. They emerge early in infancy, guide children's learning, and function throughout life.

A cross-cultural study of language and cognition: Numeral classifiers and solid object categorization

One of the central issues in cognition is identifying universal and culturally specific patterns of thought. In this study, we examined how one aspect of culture, a linguistic part of speech known asclassifiers, are related to categorization of solid objects. In Experiment 1, we used a numeral classifier elicitation task to examine the classifiers used by speakers of Hmong, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese (N = 34) with 135 nouns that referred to solid objects. In Experiment 2, adult speakers of English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Hmong (N = 64) rated the similarity of 39 pictured objects that depicted a subset of the nouns. All groups classified the objects into natural kinds and artifacts, with the category of humans anchoring both divisions. The main difference that emerged from the study was that speakers of Japanese and English rated humans and animals as more similar to each other than Hmong speakers; Mandarin speakers' ratings of the similarity between humans and animals fell in between those of Hmong and English speakers. However, the pattern of categorization of humans and animals found among speakers of the classifier languages contradicted their patterns of classifier use. The findings help to tease apart the effects of language from other cultural factors that impact cognition.

Structural asymmetries in the representation of giving and taking events

Across languages, GIVE and TAKE verbs have different syntactic requirements: GIVE mandates a patient argument to be made explicit in the clause structure, whereas TAKE does not. Experimental evidence suggests that this asymmetry is rooted in prelinguistic assumptions about the minimal number of event participants that each action entails. The present study provides corroborating evidence for this proposal by investigating whether the observation of giving and taking actions modulates the inclusion of patients in the represented event. Participants were shown events featuring an agent (A) transferring an object to, or collecting it from, an animate target (B) or an inanimate target (a rock), and their sensitivity to changes in pair composition (AB vs. AC) and action role (AB vs. BA) was measured. Change sensitivity was affected by the type of target approached when the agent transferred the object (Experiment 1), but not when she collected it (Experiment 2), or when an outside force carried out the transfer (Experiment 3). Although these object-displacing actions could be equally interpreted as interactive (i.e., directed towards B), this construal was adopted only when B could be perceived as putative patient of a giving action. This evidence buttresses the proposal that structural asymmetries in giving and taking, as reflected in their syntactic requirements, may originate from prelinguistic assumptions about the minimal event participants required for each action to be teleologically well-formed.

Visual foundations of Euclidean geometry

Geometry defines entities that can be physically realized in space, and our knowledge of abstract geometry may therefore stem from our representations of the physical world. Here, we focus on Euclidean geometry, the geometry historically regarded as "natural". We examine whether humans possess representations describing visual forms in the same way as Euclidean geometry - i.e., in terms of their shape and size. One hundred and twelve participants from the U.S. (age 3-34 years), and 25 participants from the Amazon (age 5-67 years) were asked to locate geometric deviants in panels of 6 forms of variable orientation. Participants of all ages and from both cultures detected deviant forms defined in terms of shape or size, while only U.S. adults drew distinctions between mirror images (i.e. forms differing in "sense"). Moreover, irrelevant variations of sense did not disrupt the detection of a shape or size deviant, while irrelevant variations of shape or size did. At all ages and in both cultures, participants thus retained the same properties as Euclidean geometry in their analysis of visual forms, even in the absence of formal instruction in geometry. These findings show that representations of planar visual forms provide core intuitions on which humans' knowledge in Euclidean geometry could possibly be grounded.

Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

Mandarin and English Event Cognitive Alignment From Corpus-Based Semantic Fusion Model Perspective

The study explores the fusion of semantic roles and the different semantic fusion types, aiming at establishing a semantic fusion model to explain the cognitive alignment of events in Chinese and English simple sentence constructions containing two verbs. In total, 20,280 simple sentence constructions containing two verbs are collected from Chinese literary works, Peking University Chinese Corpus, and English classic literary works. The semantic fusion in the collected simple sentence constructions containing two verbs is classified into five major semantic fusion categories, which appear with different occurrence frequencies in the two languages. The semantic fusion model of event alignment is comprehensively supported by linguistic research in Chinese and English. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, it is found that the double semantic profiles of the same syntactic element N (noun) make N psychologically activated twice and enable it to enter two processes profiled by the two verbs as a participant. The two processes are combined into one event, which designates a cognitive occurrence of any degree of complexity. N's entry into the two subevents is realized by its double semantic profiles that enable it to fuse two semantic roles into one syntactic element and explain the relationship between N's double syntactic identities and double semantic roles. The semantic fusion model was used to explore event alignment in simple sentence constructions containing two verbs, and it was discovered that the fusion of two semantic roles is universal in languages and is a common psychological and cognitive behavior deeply rooted in the mental conceptualization of language users. The empirical discussion of simple sentence constructions containing two verbs proves that semantic fusion as an important psychological passage in event alignment has solid psychological reality and verifies the applicability of the semantic fusion model in the explanation of event alignment.

The verb-self link: An implicit association test study

Agency is defined as the ability to assign and pursue goals. Given people’s focus on achieving their own goals, agency has been found to be strongly linked to the self. In two studies (N = 168), we examined whether this self–agency link is visible from a linguistic perspective. As the preferred grammatical category to convey agency is verbs, we hypothesize that, in the Implicit Association Test (IAT), verbs (vs. nouns) would be associated more strongly with the self (vs. others). Our results confirmed this hypothesis. Participants exhibited particularly fast responses when reading self-related stimuli (e.g., “me” or “my”) and verb stimuli (e.g., “deflect” or “contemplate”) both necessitated pressing an identical rather than different response keys in the IAT (d = .25). The finding connects two streams of literature—on the link between agency and verbs and on the link between self and agency—suggesting a triad between self, agency, and verbs. We argue that this verb–self link (1) opens up new perspectives for understanding linguistic expressions of agency and (2) expands our understanding of how word choice impacts socio-cognitive processing.

Actual knowledge

This response argues that when you represent others as knowing something, you represent their mind as being related to the actual world. This feature of knowledge explains the limits of knowledge attribution, how knowledge differs from belief, and why knowledge underwrites learning from others. We hope this vision for how knowledge works spurs a new era in theory of mind research.

The Acquisition of Noun and Verb Categories by Bootstrapping From a Few Known Words: A Computational Model

While many studies have shown that toddlers are able to detect syntactic regularities in speech, the learning mechanism allowing them to do this is still largely unclear. In this article, we use computational modeling to assess the plausibility of a context-based learning mechanism for the acquisition of nouns and verbs. We hypothesize that infants can assign basic semantic features, such as “is-an-object” and/or “is-an-action,” to the very first words they learn, then use these words, the semantic seed, to ground proto-categories of nouns and verbs. The contexts in which these words occur, would then be exploited to bootstrap the noun and verb categories: unknown words are attributed to the class that has been observed most frequently in the corresponding context. To test our hypothesis, we designed a series of computational experiments which used French corpora of child-directed speech and different sizes of semantic seed. We partitioned these corpora in training and test sets: the model extracted the two-word contexts of the seed from the training sets, then used them to predict the syntactic category of content words from the test sets. This very simple algorithm demonstrated to be highly efficient in a categorization task: even the smallest semantic seed (only 8 nouns and 1 verb known) yields a very high precision (~90% of new nouns; ~80% of new verbs). Recall, in contrast, was low for small seeds, and increased with the seed size. Interestingly, we observed that the contexts used most often by the model featured function words, which is in line with what we know about infants' language development. Crucially, for the learning method we evaluated here, all initialization hypotheses are plausible and fit the developmental literature (semantic seed and ability to analyse contexts). While this experiment cannot prove that this learning mechanism is indeed used by infants, it demonstrates the feasibility of a realistic learning hypothesis, by using an algorithm that relies on very little computational and memory resources. Altogether, this supports the idea that a probabilistic, context-based mechanism can be very efficient for the acquisition of syntactic categories in infants.

A simple definition of 'intentionally'

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the side-effect effect. We provide empirical support for our theory, in studies where we show that people's causation and intentionality judgments track each other closely, in everyday situations as well as in scenarios with unusual causal structures. Study 5 additionally shows that the effect of norm violations on intentionality judgments depends on the causal structure of the situation, in a way uniquely predicted by our theory. Taken together, these results suggest that the folk concept of intentional action has been difficult to define because it is made of cognitive building blocks, such as our intuitive concept of causation, whose logic cognitive scientists are just starting to understand.

Representing agents, patients, goals and instruments in causative events: A cross-linguistic investigation of early language and cognition

Although it is widely assumed that the linguistic description of events is based on a structured representation of event components at the perceptual/conceptual level, little empirical work has tested this assumption directly. Here, we test the connection between language and perception/cognition cross-linguistically, focusing on the relative salience of causative event components in language and cognition. We draw on evidence from preschoolers speaking English or Turkish. In a picture description task, Turkish-speaking 3-5-year-olds mentioned Agents less than their English-speaking peers (Turkish allows subject drop); furthermore, both language groups mentioned Patients more frequently than Goals, and Instruments less frequently than either Patients or Goals. In a change blindness task, both language groups were equally accurate at detecting changes to Agents (despite surface differences in Agent mentions). The remaining components also behaved similarly: both language groups were less accurate in detecting changes to Instruments than either Patients or Goals (even though Turkish-speaking preschoolers were less accurate overall than their English-speaking peers). To our knowledge, this is the first study offering evidence for a strong-even though not strict-homology between linguistic and conceptual event roles in young learners cross-linguistically.

The Perception of Relations

The world contains not only objects and features (red apples, glass bowls, wooden tables), but also relations holding between them (apples contained in bowls, bowls supported by tables). Representations of these relations are often developmentally precocious and linguistically privileged; but how does the mind extract them in the first place? Although relations themselves cast no light onto our eyes, a growing body of work suggests that even very sophisticated relations display key signatures of automatic visual processing. Across physical, eventive, and social domains, relations such as support, fit, cause, chase, and even socially interact are extracted rapidly, are impossible to ignore, and influence other perceptual processes. Sophisticated and structured relations are not only judged and understood, but also seen - revealing surprisingly rich content in visual perception itself.

The Language Network Is Recruited but Not Required for Nonverbal Event Semantics

The ability to combine individual concepts of objects, properties, and actions into complex representations of the world is often associated with language. Yet combinatorial event-level representations can also be constructed from nonverbal input, such as visual scenes. Here, we test whether the language network in the human brain is involved in and necessary for semantic processing of events presented nonverbally. In Experiment 1, we scanned participants with fMRI while they performed a semantic plausibility judgment task versus a difficult perceptual control task on sentences and line drawings that describe/depict simple agent-patient interactions. We found that the language network responded robustly during the semantic task performed on both sentences and pictures (although its response to sentences was stronger). Thus, language regions in healthy adults are engaged during a semantic task performed on pictorial depictions of events. But is this engagement necessary? In Experiment 2, we tested two individuals with global aphasia, who have sustained massive damage to perisylvian language areas and display severe language difficulties, against a group of age-matched control participants. Individuals with aphasia were severely impaired on the task of matching sentences to pictures. However, they performed close to controls in assessing the plausibility of pictorial depictions of agent-patient interactions. Overall, our results indicate that the left frontotemporal language network is recruited but not necessary for semantic processing of nonverbally presented events.

Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of 'boundedness' that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely to associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2-3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4-5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6-11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that 'boundedness' of words' referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take.

Mindreading in conversation

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards "factive" forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation.

Primary Cognitive Categories Are Determined by Their Invariances

The world as we perceive it is structured into objects, actions and places that form parts of events. In this article, my aim is to explain why these categories are cognitively primary. From an empiricist and evolutionary standpoint, it is argued that the reduction of the complexity of sensory signals is based on the brain's capacity to identify various types of invariances that are evolutionarily relevant for the activities of the organism. The first aim of the article is to explain why places, object and actions are primary cognitive categories in our constructions of the external world. It is shown that the invariances that determine these categories have their separate characteristics and that they are, by and large, independent of each other. This separation is supported by what is known about the neural mechanisms. The second aim is to show that the category of events can be analyzed as being constituted of the primary categories. The category of numbers is briefly discussed. Some implications for computational models of the categories are also presented.

The neural substrate of noun morphological inflection: A rapid event-related fMRI study in Italian

The present research investigated the neural correlates of nominal inflection and aimed at disclosing their possible link with the frequency distribution of noun inflectional features: grammatical gender, inflectional suffixes and inflectional classes. The properties of the Italian nominal system were exploited since it allows to explore exhaustively fine-grained phenomena in the inflectional processing. An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment was carried out where Italian masculine and feminine nouns were visually presented to 50 healthy participants in an overt inflectional task: the generation of the plural from the singular and vice versa. The grammatical gender and the citation form suffix of nouns were manipulated in a factorial design. Functional data showed that inflectional operations for nouns activate an extensive cortical network involving the left inferior and right superior frontal gyri, the left and right middle temporal gyri, the posterior cingulate cortex and the cerebellum. Activations were variably modulated by the distributional features of gender-dependent properties of nouns. Particularly, cortical activity increased during inflectional operations for small and/or scarcely consistent inflectional classes. These findings demonstrate the relevance of specific morphological (inflectional suffixes) and distributional features (size and consistency) shared by groups of words (inflectional classes) in a language, particularly when implementing cognitive operations required for language processing.

Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co-occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.

Interpreting Degree Semantics

Contemporary research in compositional, truth-conditional semantics often takes judgments of the relative unacceptability of certain phrasal combinations as evidence for lexical semantics. For example, observing that completely full sounds perfectly natural whereas completely tall does not has been used to motivate a distinction whereby the lexical entry for full but not for tall specifies a scalar endpoint. So far, such inferences seem unobjectionable. In general, however, applying this methodology can lead to dubious conclusions. For example, observing that slightly bent is natural but slightly cheap is not (that is, not without a “too cheap” interpretation) leads researchers to suggest that the interpretation of bent involves a scalar minimum but cheap does not, contra intuition—after all, one would think that what is minimally cheap is (just) free. Such claims, found in sufficient abundance, raise the question of how we can support semantic theories that posit properties of entities that those entities appear to lack. This paper argues, using theories of adjectival scale structure as a test case, that the (un)acceptability data recruited in semantic explanations reveals properties of a two-stage system of semantic interpretation that can support divergences between our semantic and metaphysical intuitions.

Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.

The grammar of emoji? Constraints on communicative pictorial sequencing

Emoji have become a prominent part of interactive digital communication. Here, we ask the questions: does a grammatical system govern the way people use emoji; and how do emoji interact with the grammar of written text? We conducted two experiments that asked participants to have a digital conversation with each other using only emoji (Experiment 1) or to substitute at least one emoji for a word in the sentences (Experiment 2). First, we found that the emoji-only utterances of participants remained at simplistic levels of patterning, primarily appearing as one-unit utterances (as formulaic expressions or responsive emotions) or as linear sequencing (for example, repeating the same emoji or providing an unordered list of semantically related emoji). Emoji playing grammatical roles (i.e., 'parts-of-speech') were minimal, and showed little consistency in 'word order'. Second, emoji were substituted more for nouns and adjectives than verbs, while also typically conveying nonredundant information to the sentences. These findings suggest that, while emoji may follow tendencies in their interactions with grammatical structure in multimodal text-emoji productions, they lack grammatical structure on their own.

It takes a village: The role of community size in linguistic regularization

Studies of artificial language learning provide insight into how learning biases and iterated learning may shape natural languages. Prior work has looked at how learners deal with unpredictable variation and how a language changes across multiple generations of learners. The present study combines these features, exploring how word order variation is preserved or regularized over generations. We investigate how these processes are affected by (1) learning biases, (2) the size of the language community, and (3) the amount of input provided. Our results show that when the input comes from a single speaker, adult learners frequency match, reproducing the variability in the input across three generations. However, when the same amount of input is distributed across multiple speakers, frequency matching breaks down. When regularization occurs, there is a strong bias for SOV word order (relative to OSV and VSO). Finally, when the amount of input provided by multiple speakers is increased, learners are able to frequency match. These results demonstrate that both population size and the amount of input per speaker each play a role in language convergence.

Concepts of objects and substances in language

People distinguish objects from the substances that constitute them. Many languages also distinguish count nouns and mass nouns. What is the relation between these two distinctions? The connection between them is complicated by the facts that (a) some mass nouns (e.g., toast) seem to name countable objects; (b) some count and mass nouns (e.g., pots and pottery) seem to name the same objects; (c) nouns for seemingly the same things can be count in one language (English: dishes) but mass in another (French: la vaisselle); (d) count nouns can be used to name substances (There is carrot in the soup) and mass nouns to name portions (She drank three whiskeys); and (e) some languages (e.g., Mandarin) appear to have no count nouns, whereas others (e.g., Yudja) appear to have no mass nouns. All these cases counter a simple object-to-count-noun and substance-to-mass-noun relation, but they provide opportunities to see whether the grammatical distinction affects the referential one. We examine evidence from such cases and find continuity through development: Infants appear to have the conceptual OBJECT/SUBSTANCE distinction very early on. Although this distinction may change with development, the acquisition of count/mass syntax does not appear to be an effective factor for change.

One can be some but some cannot be one: ERP correlates of numerosity incongruence are different for singular and plural

Humans can communicate information on numerosity by means of number words (e.g., one hundred, a couple), but also through Number morphology (e.g., through the singular vs the plural forms of a noun). Agreement violations involving Number morphology (e.g., *one apples) are well known to elicit specific ERP components such as the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN); yet, the relationship between a morphological Number value (e.g., singular vs plural) and its referential numerosity has rarely been considered in the literature. Moreover, even if agreement violations have been proven to be very useful, they do not typically characterise everyday language usage, thus narrowing the scope of the results. In this study we investigated Number morphology from a different perspective, by focusing on the ERP correlates of congruence and incongruence between a depicted numerosity and noun phrases. To this aim we designed a picture-phrase matching paradigm in Italian. In each trial, a picture depicting one or four objects was followed by a grammatically well-formed phrase made up of a quantifier and a content noun inflected either in the singular or in the plural. When analysing ERP time-locked to the content noun, plural phrases after pictures presenting one object elicited a larger negativity, similar to a LAN effect. No significant congruence effect was found in the case of the phrases whose morphological Number value conveyed a numerosity of one. Our results suggest that: 1) incongruence elicits a LAN-like negativity independently from the grammaticality of the utterances and irrespectively of the P600 component; 2) the reference to a numerosity can be partially encoded in an incremental way when processing Number morphology; and, most importantly, 3) the processing of the morphological Number value of plural is different from that of singular as the former shows a narrower interpretability than the latter.

Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren't languages more iconic?

How abstract is language? We show that abstractness pervades every corner of language, going far beyond the usual examples of freedom and justice In the light of the ubiquity of abstract words, the need to understand where abstract meanings come from becomes ever more acute. We argue that the best source of knowledge about abstract meanings may be language itself. We then consider a seemingly unrelated question: Why isn't language more iconic? Iconicity-a resemblance between the form of words and their meanings-can be immensely useful in language learning and communication. Languages could be much more iconic than they currently are. So why aren't they? We suggest that one reason is that iconicity is inimical to abstraction because iconic forms are too connected to specific contexts and sensory depictions. Form-meaning arbitrariness may allow language to better convey abstract meanings.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, i.e. who acted on whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (i.e. the actor) and Patients (i.e. the one acted upon) from visual input, but do we rapidly and spontaneously encode such roles even when our attention is otherwise occupied? In three experiments, participants observed a continuous sequence of two-person scenes and had to search for a target actor in each (the male/female or red/blue-shirted actor) by indicating with a button press whether the target appeared on the left or the right. Critically, although role was orthogonal to gender and shirt color, and was never explicitly mentioned, participants responded more slowly when the target's role switched from trial to trial (e.g., the male went from being the Patient to the Agent). In a final experiment, we demonstrated that this effect cannot be fully explained by differences in posture associated with Agents and Patients. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure from visual scenes is rapid and spontaneous.

Cross-linguistic regularities and learner biases reflect "core" mechanics

Recent research in infant cognition and adult vision suggests that the mechanical object relationships may be more salient and naturally attention grabbing than similar but non-mechanical relationships. Here we examine two novel sources of evidence from language related to this hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that adults preferentially infer that the meaning of a novel preposition refers to a mechanical as opposed to a non-mechanical relationship. Experiments 3 and 4 examine cross-linguistic adpositions obtained on a large scale from machines or from experts, respectively. While these methods differ in the ease of data collection relative to the reliability of the data, their results converge: we find that across a range of diverse and historically unrelated languages, adpositions (such as prepositions) referring to the mechanical relationships of containment (e.g “in”) and support (e.g. “on”) are systematically shorter than closely matched but not mechanical words such as “behind,” “beside,” “above,” “over,” “out,” and “off.” These results first suggest that languages regularly contain traces of core knowledge representations and that cross-linguistic regularities can therefore be a useful and easily accessible form of information that bears on the foundations of non-linguistic thought.

Not so secret agents: Event-related potentials to semantic roles in visual event comprehension

Research across domains has suggested that agents, the doers of actions, have a processing advantage over patients, the receivers of actions. We hypothesized that agents as "event builders" for discrete actions (e.g., throwing a ball, punching) build on cues embedded in their preparatory postures (e.g., reaching back an arm to throw or punch) that lead to (predictable) culminating actions, and that these cues afford frontloading of event structure processing. To test this hypothesis, we compared event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to averbal comic panels depicting preparatory agents (ex. reaching back an arm to punch) that cued specific actions with those to non-preparatory agents (ex. arm to the side) and patients that did not cue any specific actions. We also compared subsequent completed action panels (ex. agent punching patient) across conditions, where we expected an inverse pattern of ERPs indexing the differential costs of processing completed actions asa function of preparatory cues. Preparatory agents evoked a greater frontal positivity (600-900ms) relative to non-preparatory agents and patients, while subsequent completed actions panels following non-preparatory agents elicited a smaller frontal positivity (600-900ms). These results suggest that preparatory (vs. non-) postures may differentially impact the processing of agents and subsequent actions in real time.