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This pre-registration describes a control experiment with hearing non-signers as participants for the experiment on "Visual 'clicks' & sign language constituent structure" with deaf signers described here (https://osf.io/n29az).

A number of classic psycholinguistic experiments investigated how participants' response time to the perception of a "click sound" during auditory presentation of sentences is influenced by the click's position within the syntactic structure of a sentence. Here we ask whether we can also observe such an effect of “click location” in the visuo-gestural modality?

Preregistration of our systematic review on fetal and neonatal evidence for prenatal auditory learning that is of importance in language learning.

This pre-registration is for a replication of a pilot experiment investigating whether an expectation for iconicity can be manipulated in the lab.

This study investigates the role of the inner voice in control of sustained physical efforts - specifically in this case cycling on a stationary exercise bike. Participants will be ask to cycle 1-minute intervals on the exercise bike under 2-back matching verbal or non-verbal distracting conditions as well as in a control condition. If they need their inner voice to maximise cycling performance, we hypothesise that the performance will be more impaired in the verbal distraction condition compared to a non-verbal or a control condition.

This study investigates the role of the inner voice in control of sustained physical efforts - specifically in this case cycling on a stationary exercise bike. Participants will be ask to cycle 1-minute intervals on the exercise bike under verbal or non-verbal distracting conditions. If they need their inner voice to maximise cycling performance, we hypothesise that the performance will be more impaired in the verbal distraction condition compared to a non-verbal or a control condition.

This project investigates the prominence and consequences of the trend in experimental language acquisition research to employ only female-talkers in the creation of auditory stimuli

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional insights from previous lexical frequency studies conducted for American Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language. This approach has informed us that signers who learn the 100 most frequent signs in Irish Sign Language, will know a third of the language’s vocabulary. This study has found that, in the main, frequency statistics from Irish Sign Language are in line with previous studies and that the text type and annotation strategy can significantly impact results. We found that, without a formalised lexicon, lexical glosses fell short of the requirements for a lexical frequency analysis. However, supported by grammatical class data, frequency data may be reported for symbolic units.

Recent work suggests that linguistic structure develops through cultural evolution, as a consequence of the repeated cycle of learning and use by which languages persist. This work has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of the cognitive basis for language; in particular, human language and the cognitive capacities underpinning it are likely to have been shaped by co‐evolutionary processes, where the cultural evolution of linguistic systems is shaped by and in turn shapes the biological evolution of the capacities underpinning language learning. I review several models of this co‐evolutionary process, which suggest that the precise relationship between evolved biases in individuals and the structure of linguistic systems depends on the extent to which cultural evolution masks or unmasks individual‐level cognitive biases from selection. I finish by discussing how these co‐evolutionary models might be extended to cases where the biases involved in learning are themselves shaped by experience, as is the case for language., Smith gives an excellent overview on research in language evolution, in which he discusses several recent models of how linguistic systems and the cognitive capacities involved in language learning may have co‐evolved. He illustrates how combined pressures on language learning and communication/use produce compositionally structured languages. Once in place, a (culturally transmitted) communication system creates new selection pressures on the capacity for acquiring these systems.

Where does linguistic structure come from? We suggest that systematicity in language evolves adaptively in response to environmental and contextual affordances associated with the practice of communication itself. In two experiments, we used a silent gesture referential game paradigm to investigate environmental and social factors promoting the propagation of systematicity in a novel communication system. We found that structure in the emerging communication systems evolve contingent on structural properties of the environment. More specifically, interlocutors spontaneously relied on structural features of the referent stimuli they communicated about to motivate systematic aspects of the evolving communication system even when idiosyncratic iconic strategies were equally afforded. Furthermore, we found systematicity to be promoted by the nature of the referent environment. When the referent environment was open and unstable, analytic systematic strategies were more likely to emerge compared to stimulus environments with a closed set of referents. Lastly, we found that displacement of communication promoted systematicity. That is, when interlocutors had to communicate about items not immediately present in the moment of communication, they were more likely to evolve systematic solutions, supposedly due to working memory advantages. Together, our findings provide experimental evidence for the idea that linguistic structure evolves adaptively from contextually situated language use.

In this thesis, I use an experimental model to investigate the role of social pressures in stimulating language divergence. Research into the evolution of cooperation has emphasised the usefulness of in-group markers for swiftly identifying outsiders, who pose a threat to cooperative networks. Mechanisms for avoiding cheats and freeriders, which tend to rely on reputation, or on (explicit and implicit) contracts between individuals, are considerably less effective against short-term visitors. Outsiders, moreover, may behave according to different social norms, which may adversely affect cooperative interactions with them. There are many sources of markers by which insiders and outsiders can be distinguished, but language is a particularly impressive one.If human beings exploit linguistic variation for this purpose, we might expect the exploitation to have an influence on the cultural evolution of language, and to be involved in language divergence, since it introduces a selective pressure, by which linguistic variants are selected on the basis of their social significance. However, there is also a neutral, mechanistic model of dialect formation that relies on unconscious accommodation between interlocutors, coupled with variation in the frequency of interaction, to account for divergence. In studies of real-world communities, these factors are difficult to tease apart.The model described in this thesis put real speakers in the artificial environment of a computer game. A game consisted of a series of rounds in which players were paired up with each other in a pseudo-random order. During a round, pairs of players exchanged typed messages in a highly restricted artificial “alien language”. Each player began the game with a certain number of points, distributed between various resources, and the purpose of sending messages was to negotiate to exchange these resources. Any points given away were worth double to the receiver, so, by exchanging resources, players could accumulate points for their team. However, the pairings were anonymous: until the end of a round, players were not told who they had been paired with.This basic paradigm allowed the investigation of the major factors influencing language divergence, as well as the small-scale individual strategies that contribute to it. Two major factors were manipulated: frequency of interaction and competitiveness. In one condition, all players in a game were working together; in another condition, players were put into teams, such that giving away resources to team- mates was advantageous, but giving them to opponents was not. This put a pressure on players to use variation in the alien language to mark identity. A combination of this pressure and a minimum level of interaction between teammates was found to be sufficient for the alien language to diverge into “dialects”. Neither factor was sufficient on its own.The results of these experiments suggest that a pressure for the socially based selection of linguistic variants can lead to divergence in a very short time, given sufficient levels of interaction between members of a group.

we test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture, and reading aloud an object’s name, are affected by the object’s speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed objects despite the fact that object speed is irrelevant to the naming task at hand. The results of a series of 7 studies with pictures and words support these predictions.

[In Russian] The article takes into account recent findings in somatosensory neuroscience and provides a new perspective of understanding culturally and biologically predetermined semantics of contact gestures.

For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, “communication mode” is often included as a predictor of performance across a wide range of developmental outcomes; however, the operationalization of communication mode is highly variable and often falls short of what would be ideal. Here, I argue that DHH children, their families and service providers, and the field as a whole would benefit from replacing the concept of “communication mode” with that of “language access profile”: a term that reflects the child’s cumulative experience with various types of communicative input, beginning at birth. Language access profiles are intended to capture the multidimensional and dynamic nature of DHH children’s early experiences with diverse types of communicative input. I present data from a study that presents a new method of estimating individual language access profiles. I also use hierarchical cluster analysis to organize individuals with similar profiles into coherent, data-driven groups. Results suggest that this is a promising approach with strong potential for use in diverse contexts, including education, clinical care, and research.

Recent controversies in psychology have highlighted disagreements about how science works and how science proceeds. Despite the existence of tools and data that can help to address some of these disagreements, psychologists have been slow to provide empirical evidence that speaks to these issues. Indeed, there is essentially no work on how scientists communicate their findings. In this paper, I use language from scientific literature to answer questions about scientific behavior. Specifically, I find that features of data analysis practices to be associated with two narrative features of these manuscripts -- hedging (diminishing claims) and boosting (amplifying claims). The use of hedging and boosting were found to be associated with statistical errors. Hedging and boosting were also found to be associated with and statistical overfitting, though this relationship is more uncertain. Additionally male first-authors are less likely to hedge. No other characteristics of the author were found to be associated with these linguistics features. Though the work is exploratory, the results are largely consistent with a linguistic overfitting hypothesis, in which the authors of a paper use language to amplify and diminish findings in a paper in order to create a more compelling narrative around theory. The flexibility of language is a powerful tool used to communicate research, but there is a fine line between effective interpretation of data and convenient overinterpretation, and it is worthwhile to be cognizant of when that line may be crossed.

Summary -- The concept of cognitive conflict, that being two competing ideas in the brain at the same time, encompasses a large number of instantiations throughout Psychology (Festinger, 1964; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006), even playing an important role in many philosophies considering how science works best (Kuhn, 1962; Platt, 1964; Popper, 1934/ 2005). This experience of cognitive conflict is widely considered to be aversive, but also motivating, for individuals across a wide range of contexts. Here I examined two ways cognitive conflict affects what topics receive scientific attention. Pairing the philosophies of science with Festinger’s (1950) hypotheses about informal social communication, it was hypothesized that:1.Scientists will discuss things they disagree about more than things they agree about. 2.Scientists will study more those topics which threaten individual or group outcomes. Utilizing publicly available data about scientific publications, I tested these hypotheses within a number of contexts, including public comments on papers, Tweets about papers and topics, and the author and automatically generated keywords describing scientific papers themselves (as a measure of what scientists write about and study). Two studies suggested that more negations in the texts (e.g., but, not, however) were related to larger discussions, more views, and more media attention. Two other studies examined the keywords describing papers, first all papers published across science by PLoS, and then all papers across publishers within Psychology. Both studies suggested that there are more unique negative keywords studied, and that these keywords have more papers written about them, on average. Overall, the results suggest that scientists talk more when they disagree, and that they speak more about threats to the group and individual. This more generally implies that cognitive conflict plays a role in determining what scientists talk about and study, and more generally that general psychological principles can be applied within the context of science.