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In this study we investigate semantic retrieval strategies in order to inform discussions about cognitive mechanisms underlying divergent thinking and creativity. Relying on a verbal fluency task, we map the particular associative strategies participants engage and how they predict their performance. The study starts from the assumption that during divergent thinking processes, participants move along a path through a semantic space, and that each step is prompted by an associative strategy taking them from one word to the next. There are, however, a number of such strategies, and we predict that the outcome of the process is contingent on participants’ engagement of and shift between strategies. The study consists of a two-part elicitation paradigm where participants first conduct a verbal fluency task and then are guided through a meta-cognitive retrieval process to individuate the strategies employed in the task. We report significant correlations between the engagement of associative strategies and outcome measures of divergent thinking in terms of originality, flexibility and fluency.

CogSci 2023

Semantic Retrieval Strategies in Divergent Thinking

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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Young children’s intuitions about the meanings of novel nouns reveal foundational biases in language learning, such as biases to generalize nouns to objects of the same shapes, to whole—as opposed to parts of—objects, and to objects from the same taxonomic category. Nevertheless, existing work on such word-learning biases has focused primarily on only one spatial domain to which nouns might refer: objects. In a noun-extension task, we evaluate young children’s and adults’ word-learning biases across two spatial domains—objects and places—and show that young children and adults preferentially extend novel nouns to objects, not the places that the objects are situated in.

Young Children and Adults Extend Novel Nouns to Objects not Places

Systems of semantic categories vary across languages, and it has been proposed that this variation is constrained by a need for efficiency in communication. An important element of efficiency is communicative need, or how often a particular object needs to be referenced. Previous work has sometimes assumed for simplicity that the distribution of need over objects in a semantic domain does not vary across languages or cultures. Here, we explore culture-specific need as it relates to the kinship terminologies of Hindi and English. We assess the efficiency of each language's kin naming system under a variety of need distributions, including one based on that language's usage statistics, one based on the other language's usage statistics, and random permutations of each of those two distributions. Our results suggest that kinship terminologies reflect culture-specific communicative need.

Kinship terminologies reflect culture-specific communicative need: Evidence from Hindi and English

Monolingual and bilingual speakers of the same languages derive unique meanings for words, partly based on between-language differences in meaning of translation approximate words. Do language models also capture this semantic variability? We compared several language models of lexical semantic representation and their correspondences to a behavioral word meaning task done by both L1 and L2 English speakers. We found most language models suggest more similarity between L1 and L2 English speakers and more cross-language similarity between Mandarin and English language models than is supported by psycholinguistic research. We conducted follow-up analysis for the GloVe and OpenAI’s Davinci models and found that individual bilingual participants’ similarity to these models did not relate to language history variables that predict bilingual lexical semantic native-likeness. We conclude that language models are not yet reliable reference points for tracking lexical semantic learning, and we discuss the implications for future directions in computational and psycholinguistics.

Language Models Show Within- and Cross-language Similarities in Concrete Noun Meaning, but not Differences Between L1 and L2 English Speakers

By 24 months, children rapidly infer the meanings of words from sentence context: for instance, inferring from “She eats the dax” that “dax” refers to a food item. However, prior work has typically presented these informative sentence contexts in the presence of the target referent; it is less clear whether sentence context on one exposure will influence learners’ referential hypotheses on subsequent exposures. Here, we present results suggesting that even adults have some difficulty using a word’s prior sentence context to constrain its subsequent hypothesized referents, and 3-year-olds fail to make these cross-exposure inferences at all. Finally, we examine an alternative avenue for sentence context to guide word learning: adults successfully use informative sentence contexts to disambiguate between previously encountered referents. Ongoing work examines this question in children. These results suggest linguistic context is most useful for forming in-the-moment hypotheses but may, in some contexts, also facilitate learning across exposures.

Examining the role of sentence context in cross-situational word learning

Aspectual coercion occurs when there is a semantic mismatch between constituents in terms of their lexical aspect. If people fully commit to an aspectual alternative (telic or atelic), one should see the reflections of this shift in their behavior. Here we introduce a new paradigm that can reliably detect how (and whether) comprehenders process aspectual coercion to commit to an aspectual alternative as they inspect the referential world of dynamic events. In two experiments, viewers watched short movie clips and were asked to indicate whether they saw an interruption. Interruptions occurred at either the midpoint or the endpoint of the events. Telic vs. atelic sentences with and without coercion were shown prior to the movie clips. Of interest was whether processing the sentences would influence event construal and hence the detection of interruptions at midpoints vs. endpoints. Our findings reveal cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion in how comprehenders inspect the visual world of events.

Cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion

The present study examined whether acquisition of Japanese particles ga and wa is a precondition for Japanese-speaking children to pass False-Belief Task. The two particles ga and wa are different in that the former is attached to new information and the latter marks old information. Mastering appropriate use of these two particles requires the mind reading ability to understand what is known or unknown to others, hence it can be potentially related to Theory of Mind. The result of an online experiment with Japanese-speaking children aged 3 to 7 showed that children who gained higher accuracy for items about the use of wa in Sentence Repetition Task were more likely to pass False-Belief Task. This suggests that acquisition of grammatical elements expressing information status might be a prerequisite to pass False-Belief Tasks as it helps children understand other’s mind.

Is Acquisition of Japanese Particles Ga and Wa a Key to Theory of Mind Development? Evidence from Online Experiment with Sentence Repetition Task

Adults represent events through abstract roles: e.g., when Jim eats chocolate, Jim is an “Agent” and the chocolate a “Patient.” These roles are thought to be universally prominent across languages (Strickland, 2016). Nonetheless, learning to sort pictures into Agent and Patient categories is difficult for some individuals (Rissman & Lupyan, 2022). Which contexts affect the accessibility of these roles to explicit reasoning? Across two pre-registered experiments, English-speaking adults viewed pictures of an Agent acting on a Patient (e.g., one person kicking another). In each picture, a red dot marked either the Agent or the Patient. In one condition, participants freely sorted the pictures into two categories. In another condition, the pictures were accompanied by a nonsense verb marked with the suffix -ja or -ka. In both experiments, participants in the language condition were significantly more likely to sort by the Agent/Patient distinction, suggesting that language makes abstract roles more accessible.

Accessibility of Agent and Patient roles is shaped by context

Scalar words such as 'warm' often give rise to inferences such as 'warm but not hot'. Research has shown that weak scalars ('warm') prime stronger ones ('hot'), suggesting that the latter are used in implicature processing (Ronai & Xiang, 2023). We examine whether priming holds when no implicature is expected to arise. Under standard accounts, scalar implicatures are derived by negating stronger alternatives. We first tested sentences with negation and asked whether 'hot' is primed when comprehenders are exposed to 'not warm'. Then we tested antonyms, such as 'cold', which are assumed to be on a separate scale. In line with theoretical accounts (Horn, 1972), negated weak scalars did not prime strong ones. Contrary to these accounts, antonyms primed the target words. We explain these findings within the Alternative Activation Account (Gotzner, 2017) that assumes initial activation of alternatives and their subsequent contextual narrowing.

Which alternatives are relevant in scalar implicature processing? A priming study with antonyms and negation

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively and to contribute relevant and informative utterances. Often however, speakers produce trivial utterances which may violate our expectations of informativity which can prompt listeners to infer about a speaker’s goals for producing such an utterance. The present work investigates how and when listeners derive informativity-based inferences and demonstrates that speaker knowledge plays an important role in the computation of inferences. Furthermore the data shows that these inferences do not always arise automatically and their computation is costly.

Availability and Timing of Informativity Inferences

Intransitive verbs in human language can be subcategorized into at least two linguistic categories, unaccusative and unergative verbs. The definitive factor of this categorization is argued to be the meaning of the verb, while the Constructional approach suggests the sentence a verb appears in plays a role in categorization. In this study, we develop a word2vec model which leverages the context in which a verb appears in to represent the semantics of verbs and this basis of distributional semantics serves as a method to examine the Constructional approach. Our results suggest categories of Unaccusativity of new verbs can be formed on the basis of the contexts in which verbs appear, and the frequency of verbs in certain contexts can be a significant factor. We administered a child acquisition experiment to further demonstrate that, given the meaning of a new verb, sentences in which new verbs appear do significantly affect the categorization of Unaccusativity of new verbs. We conclude that, in addition to the meaning of intransitive verbs, the contextual environment is indeed a crucial factor in Mandarin Unaccusativity.

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Young Children and Adults Extend Novel Nouns to Objects not Places

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