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Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately run into significant difficulties -- difficulties that illustrate the utility of abstractions. I conclude with a brief review of modern symbolic approaches that address the concerns Ambridge raises about abstractions. [For Ben Ambridge's "Against Stored Abstractions: A Radical Exemplar Model of Language Acquisition," see EJ1269951.]

Widespread failures of replication and generalization are, ironically, a scientific triumph, in that they confirm the fundamental metascientific theory that underlies our field. Generalizable and replicable findings require testing large numbers of subjects from a wide range of demographics with a large, randomly‐sampled stimulus set, and using a variety of experimental parameters. Because few studies accomplish any of this, meta‐scientists predict that findings will frequently fail to replicate or generalize. We argue that to be more robust and replicable, developmental psychology needs to find a mechanism for collecting data at a greater scale and from more diverse populations. Luckily, this mechanism already exists as follows: Citizen science, in which large numbers of uncompensated volunteers provide data. While best‐known for its contributions to astronomy and ecology, citizen science has also produced major findings in neuroscience and psychology, and increasingly in developmental psychology. We provide examples, address practical challenges, discuss limitations, and compare to other methods of obtaining large datasets. Ultimately, we argue that the range of studies where it makes sense *not* to use citizen science is steadily dwindling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Famously, "dog bites man" is trivia whereas "man bites dog" is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic role and syntactic position. These mappings are typically predictable, and previous work demonstrates that young children are sensitive to these patterns and so could use them in acquisition. However, there is only limited and mixed evidence that children do use this information to guide acquisition outside of the laboratory. We find that children understand emotion verbs which follow the canonical CAUSE-VERB-PATIENT pattern ("Mary frightened/delighted John") earlier than those which do not ("Mary feared/liked John"), despite the latter's higher frequency, suggesting children's generalization of the mapping between causativity and transitivity is broad and active in acquisition.

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. "holded") produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms ("held") better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars ("folded", "molded"). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation ("hold"+-"ed"). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms ("walked") that men generally compose with the grammatical system ("walk"+-"ed"). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language.

Cognitive science has evolved since early disputes between radical empiricism and radical nativism. The authors are reacting to the revival of radical empiricism spurred by recent successes in deep neural network (NN) models. We agree that language-like mental representations (language-of-thoughts [LoTs]) are part of the best game in town, but they cannot be understood independent of the other players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is no doubt that children raised bilingual can become extremely proficient in both languages, theorists are divided on whether bilingualism is effectively monolingualism twice (the "Two Monolinguals in One Brain" hypothesis) or differs in some fundamental way from monolingualism. A strong version of the "Two Monolinguals" hypothesis predicts that bilinguals can achieve monolingual-level proficiency in either (or both) of their languages. Recently, Bylund and Abrahamsson argued that evidence of lower syntactic proficiency in simultaneous bilinguals was due to confounds of language dominance; when simultaneous bilinguals are tested in their primary language, any difference disappears. We find no evidence for this hypothesis. Meta-analysis and Monte Carlo simulation show that variation in published results is fully consistent with sampling error, with no evidence that method mattered. Meta-analytic estimates strongly indicate lower syntactic performance by simultaneous bilinguals relative to monolinguals. Re-analysis of a large dataset (N = 115,020) confirms this finding, even controlling for language dominance. Interestingly, the effect is relatively small, challenging current theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is highly heterogeneous. Identifying systematic individual differences in neuroanatomy could inform diagnosis and personalized interventions. The challenge is that these differences are entangled with variation because of other causes: individual differences unrelated to ASD and measurement artifacts. We used contrastive deep learning to disentangle ASD-specific neuroanatomical variation from variation shared with typical control participants. ASD-specific variation correlated with individual differences in symptoms. The structure of this ASD-specific variation also addresses a long-standing debate about the nature of ASD: At least in terms of neuroanatomy, individuals do not cluster into distinct subtypes; instead, they are organized along continuous dimensions that affect distinct sets of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form "SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because..." where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows "because"—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Simon, Stroop, and Eriksen flanker tasks are commonly used to assess cognitive control across the lifespan. However, it remains unclear whether these three tasks in fact measure the same cognitive abilities and in the same proportion. We take a developmental approach to this question: if the Simon, Stroop, and flanker tasks all roughly measure the same capacity, they should show similar patterns of age-related change. We present data from two massive online cross-sectional studies: Study 1 included 9,585 native English speakers between 10 and 80 years of age who completed the Simon and Stroop tasks, and Study 2 included 13,448 English speakers between 10 and 79 years of age who completed the flanker task. Of the three tasks, only the flanker task revealed an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory, with performance improving until approximately 23 years of age and declining starting around 40 years of age. Performance on the Simon and Stroop tasks peaked around 34 and 26 years of age, respectively, and did not decline significantly in later life, though it is possible that age-related declines would be observed with more difficult versions of the tasks. Although the Simon and Stroop tasks are commonly interpreted to target similar underlying processes, we observed near zero correlations between the congruency effects observed in each task in terms of both accuracy and response time. We discuss these results in light of recent debates regarding the suitability of these tasks for assessing developmental and individual differences in cognitive control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., Sally ate some of the cookies implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalised procedure or instead a complex, contextualised inference. We find that in sentences like If Sally ate some of the cookies, then the rest are on the counter, that the rest triggers a late, sustained positivity relative to Sally ate some of the cookies, and the rest are on the counter. This is consistent with behavioural results and linguistic theory suggesting that the former sentence does not trigger a scalar implicature. This motivates a view on which scalar implicature is contextualised but dependent on grammatical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightens Mary because she . . . with Sally loves Mary because she . . .). This ''implicit causality'' phenomenon is understood to reflect intuitions about who caused the event. Researchers have debated whether these intuitions are based on linguistic structure or instead a function of high-level, non-linguistic cognition. Two lines of evidence support the latter conclusion: implicit causality is related to a broad social judgement task, and it is affected by general knowledge about the participants in the event. On closer inspection, neither of these claims have been established. Eight new experiments find that (a) the relationship between implicit causality and the social judgement task is tenuous, and (b) previously employed event-participant manipulations have minimal to no effect on implicit causality. These findings support an account on which implicit causality is driven primarily by linguistic structure and only minimally by general knowledge and non-linguistic cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as “implicit causality”. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrastSally frightened Mary because she …withSally feared Mary because she…). A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs. However, such studies have focused on a small number of specially selected verbs. In Experiment 1, we find that existing taxonomies perform near chance at predicting pronoun-resolution bias on a large set of representative verbs. However, a more fine-grained taxonomy recently proposed in the linguistics literature does significantly better. In Experiment 2, we tested all 264 verbs in two of the narrowly defined verb classes from this new taxonomy, finding that pronoun-resolution biases were categorically different. These findings suggest that the semantic structure of verbs tightly constrains the interpretation of pronouns in causal sentences, raising challenges for theories which posit that implicit causality biases reflect world knowledge or arbitrary lexical features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lakoff (2016) describes an account of conceptual representation based in part on metaphor. Though promising, this account faces several challenges with respect to learning and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have debated for 134 years whether birth order has long-term effects on the development of a child, and so far no consensus has emerged. In addition to practical applications and relevance to the study of personality, birth order effects are an important test case tot theories about how and whether home environment affects the adults children become (Pinker, 2002; Sulloway, 1996). In two large surveys of diverse populations, we found that people are more likely to form close platonic and romantic relationships with other people of the same birth order. This effect cannot be explained by confounds of family size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated. Methodology/Principal Findings: Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%. Conclusions/Significance: This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to attain native-like proficiency of a second language is heavily dependent on the age at which learning begins. However, the exact properties of this phenomenon remain unclear, and the literature is divided. Recently, Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, & Pinker presented a novel computational analysis of over 600,000 subjects, estimating that the ability to learn syntax drops at 17.4 years of age [Hartshorne, J. K., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition, 177, 263-277]. However, the novelty of the dataset and analyses raises questions and suggests caution [Frank, M. C. (2018). With great data comes great (theoretical) opportunity. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(8), 669-671]. In the present paper, we address several such concerns by employing improved psychometric measurement, calculating confidence intervals, and considering alternative models. We also present data from an additional 466,607 subjects. The results support the prior report of a sharp decline in the ability to learn syntax, commencing at the tail end of adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Famously, dog bites man is trivial whereas man bites dog is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic role and syntactic position. These mappings are typically predictable, and previous work demonstrates that young children are sensitive to these patterns and so could use them in acquisition. However, there is only limited and mixed evidence that children do use this information to guide acquisition outside of the laboratory. We find that children understand emotion verbs which follow the canonical CAUSE–VERB–PATIENT pattern (Mary frightened/delighted John) earlier than those which do not (Mary feared/liked John), despite the latter's higher frequency, suggesting children's generalization of the mapping between causativity and transitivity is broad and active in acquisition., Linguistics, Psychology

In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years., Psychology

Recent reports have suggested that many published results are unreliable. To increase the reliability and accuracy of published papers, multiple changes have been proposed, such as changes in statistical methods. We support such reforms. However, we believe that the incentive structure of scientific publishing must change for such reforms to be successful. Under the current system, the quality of individual scientists is judged on the basis of their number of publications and citations, with journals similarly judged via numbers of citations. Neither of these measures takes into account the replicability of the published findings, as false or controversial results are often particularly widely cited. We propose tracking replications as a means of post-publication evaluation, both to help researchers identify reliable findings and to incentivize the publication of reliable results. Tracking replications requires a database linking published studies that replicate one another. As any such data- base is limited by the number of replication attempts published, we propose establishing an open-access journal dedicated to publishing replication attempts. Data quality of both the database and the affiliated journal would be ensured through a combination of crowd- sourcing and peer review. As reports in the database are aggregated, ultimately it will be possible to calculate replicability scores, which may be used alongside citation counts to evaluate the quality of work published in individual journals. In this paper, we lay out a detailed description of how this system could be implemented, including mechanisms for compiling the information, ensuring data quality, and incentivizing the research community to participate., Psychology