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We investigated the impact of linguistic cues and autistic traits on lie detection. Adult participants (N = 125) judged suspects' statements in a detective game. Untruthful statements were marked by semantic leakage. Literature indicates that liars use fewer first-person pronouns and mental-state terms than truth-tellers. We manipulated the untruthful statements for the presence/absence of these cues to test their effect on lie detection. The adults were 89% accurate in detecting lies. Mental-state terms did not affect accuracy, while presence of first-person pronouns hindered it. Having autistic traits did not influence lie detection. However, adults with higher autistic traits struggled to detect lies when these contained both a first-person pronoun and a mental-state term. Post-hoc analysis revealed lower lie detection accuracy for longer sentences. Our findings underscore the significance of semantic leakage in lie detection, with nuanced effects of linguistic cues on accuracy, particularly for adults with higher autistic traits.

This study investigates the longitudinal effects of cognitive aging on elderly adults’ sentence processing. To this aim, 16 Dutch elderly adults who participated in a previous study on idiom processing were tested again three years later, using the same event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. Compared to the previous study, we found the same reduced N400 for idiomatic sentences and for sentences preceded by a predictive context, and the same increased P600 for literal sentences preceded by a predictive context. However, the general N400 effect decreased over time, whereas the general P600 effect increased over time. Our findings suggest that elderly adults’ ability to benefit from context information and the fixed character of idioms to facilitate sentence processing is preserved over time. However, the longitudinal changes in the N400 and P600 effect suggest that elderly adults adopt alternative processing strategies to compensate for age-related cognitive decline.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This chapter considers the challenges that children face when acquiring pronouns in their first language. These challenges include the way pronouns may shift reference depending on who is the speaker and who is the addressee, how the interpretation and use of pronouns is restricted by syntactic structure, and in what way discourse pragmatics and possibly also the perspective of the conversational partner influence their interpretation and use. In doing so, the chapter refers to research on multiple languages and considers both pronoun production and pronoun comprehension.

Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with distributional meaning representations, thereby introducing the notion of semantic similarity into formal semantics, or to define distributional systems that aim to incorporate formal notions such as entailment and compositionality. However, given the fundamentally different 'representational currency' underlying formal and distributional approaches - models of the world versus linguistic co-occurrence - their unification has proven extremely difficult. Here, we define a Distributional Formal Semantics that integrates distributionality into a formal semantic system on the level of formal models. This approach offers probabilistic, distributed meaning representations that are also inherently compositional, and that naturally capture fundamental semantic notions such as quantification and entailment. Furthermore, we show how the probabilistic nature of these representations allows for probabilistic inference, and how the information-theoretic notion of "information" (measured in terms of Entropy and Surprisal) naturally follows from it. Finally, we illustrate how meaning representations can be derived incrementally from linguistic input using a recurrent neural network model, and how the resultant incremental semantic construction procedure intuitively captures key semantic phenomena, including negation, presupposition, and anaphoricity., Comment: To appear in: Information and Computation (WoLLIC 2019 Special Issue)

This study investigates comprehension of subject-verb agreement by German speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) (n=31, 7;1-12;4, mean: 9;6) and children with normal hearing (NH) (n=36, age 7;5-10;9, mean: 9;0). Previous research has shown that young children with NH have problems in the interpretation of verb inflection. For children with CIs, the subtle verb inflection information may be even harder to detect and comprehend. In a picture selection task with eye-tracking we found that children with CIs are less sensitive to number information provided by the verb (e.g., Sie malt/malen die Prinzessin ‘she/they paint(s) the princess) than children with NH (CI: 85% correct, NH: 96% correct). Children with higher working memory scores are better in identifying the number of the subject. In contrast to children with NH, children with CIs identify the number of the subject earlier and better in sentences with strong verbs, where the singular and plural verb forms are perceptually more distinctive, than in sentences with weak verbs. Thus both cognitive and perceptual factors play a role in the processing of subject-verb agreement by children with CIs.

This study investigates comprehension of subject-verb agreement by German speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) (n=31, 7;1-12;4, mean: 9;6) and children with normal hearing (NH) (n=36, age 7;5-10;9, mean: 9;0). Previous research has shown that young children with NH have problems in the interpretation of verb inflection. For children with CIs, the subtle verb inflection information may be even harder to detect and comprehend. In a picture selection task with eye-tracking we found that children with CIs are less sensitive to number information provided by the verb (e.g., Sie malt/malen die Prinzessin ‘she/they paint(s) the princess) than children with NH (CI: 85% correct, NH: 96% correct). Children with higher working memory scores are better in identifying the number of the subject. In contrast to children with NH, children with CIs identify the number of the subject earlier and better in sentences with strong verbs, where the singular and plural verb forms are perceptually more distinctive, than in sentences with weak verbs. Thus both cognitive and perceptual factors play a role in the processing of subject-verb agreement by children with CIs.

In this paper, we present a cognitive model that simulates the processing of subject pronouns in Italian. The model is implemented in the cognitive architecture ACT-R and uses hierarchically ranked constraints to select the most likely referent of a pronoun. When this model is combined with a measure of accessibility in discourse and a processing time limit imposed by the speed of natural language production, the model accounts for novel empirical data of the interpretation of null as well as overt subject pronouns in Italian. The model generates concrete predictions on the basis of variations in cognitive capacities, which can be tested in subsequent experiments.

It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.