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We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We conclude that language is unlikely to be merely a medium in which independently constituted thoughts are expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Symposium we link different perspectives and traditions of research on language and concepts in the cognitive sciences to better understand the process of abstraction from the social-interactive standpoint. In contrast to the usual benefits of abstraction – such as the ability to categorize and generalize – we underscore the possibility of abstract concepts and words to remain underspecified, “open to the context, the suggestions of others” (Borghi, 2023) or to processes of real-time negotiations (Christiansen & Chater, 2022). This is enabled by their largely non-perceptual rela-tional character (Gentner, 2005) and by the fact that they arise in cognitive systems continually embedded and active in their environments (Cisek 1999; Mannella & Tummolini 2023).

Events are a fundamental part of human experience. Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing central aspects of how humans perceive, conceptualize, communicate about, and remember events. This symposium offers an interdisciplinary look at recent advances in the study of event cognition. The symposium brings together cognitive scientists from across continents, who are experts on the subject. The symposium contributors come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neuro-computational psychology, and linguistics. They combine a variety of innovative and integrative approaches and methodologies and study diverse populations across the lifespan and across languages. The overall goal of this symposium is to foster an interdisciplinary conversation on different aspects of event cognition.

The framework of event perception suggests that people segment continuous perceptual input into discrete events by forming mental representations of ongoing activity. Prior work extending the segmentation framework to emotion perception shows that a richer emotion vocabulary is associated with segmentation of emotion events in greater agreement with the cultural ingroup. However, little is known about how labeling behaviors themselves shape the segmentation of emotion events. Here, we look at the effect of labeling on emotion segmentation. Participants were randomly assigned to simply segment videos into discrete emotion events or to segment only when an emotion label is available and to label the segmented event. We found that compared to the group that segmented without providing labels, the group that segmented with explicit labeling behaviors were less sensitive at discriminating emotion events from non-emotion events and more conservative to identify an emotion event. The results are discussed with respect to competing theoretical accounts of the impact of labeling on emotion perception and suggest that the conceptual broadening account (where labels invoke idiographic emotion representations) may best account for the findings.

Humans extract useful abstractions of the world from noisy sensory data. Serial reproduction allows us to study how people construe the world through a paradigm similar to the game of telephone, where one person observes a stimulus and reproduces it for the next to form a chain of reproductions. Past serial reproduction experiments typically employ a single sensory modality, but humans often communicate abstractions of the world to each other through language. To investigate the effect language on the formation of abstractions, we implement a novel multimodal serial reproduction framework by asking people who receive a visual stimulus to reproduce it in a linguistic format, and vice versa. We ran unimodal and multimodal chains with both humans and GPT-4 and find that adding language as a modality has a larger effect on human reproductions than GPT-4's. This suggests human visual and linguistic representations are more dissociable than those of GPT-4.

Aphantasia, namely the inability to voluntarily form visual mental imagery, does not, counterintuitively, impair the affected from successfully performing mental imagery tasks. One way of explaining this finding is to posit that aphantasics, despite their claim to the contrary, can form visual imagery, a position here referred to as aphantasia skepticism. This article outlines and rejects two types of aphantasia skepticism and argues that the position results from what is coined the visualizer's fallacy, namely the false belief that visual mental imagery is necessary to carry out mental imagery tasks. Furthermore, it is argued that the visualizer's fallacy and the resulting aphantasia skepticism are not only potentially harmful to aphantasics but may also lead to an impoverished view of the dynamics of cognition in general.

We examine the relation between event segmentation in language and cognition in the domain of motion events, focusing on Turkish, a verb-framed language that segments motion paths in separate linguistic units (verb clauses). We compare motion events that have a path change to those that did not have a path change. In the linguistic task, participants were more likely to use multiple verb phrases when describing events that had a path change compared to those that did not have a path change. In the non-linguistic Dwell Time task, participants viewed self-paced slideshows of still images sampled from the motion event videos in the linguistic task. Dwell times for slides corresponding to path changes were not significantly longer than those for temporally similar slides in the events without a path change. These findings suggest that event units in language may not have strong and stable influences on event segmentation in cognition.

Daily experiences are conceptualized as events involving multiple participants and their relations (i.e., thematic roles). When describing events, speakers often do not include all event participants involved. Here, we explore how underlying conceptual requirements and language-specific encoding options influence the content of event descriptions in speech and gesture in two typologically different languages (English, Turkish). Focusing on conceptually peripheral instruments whose status is highly debated, we manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that ‘require' or ‘allow' otherwise syntactically optional instruments. Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not manifest uniformly in Turkish and English in speech, gesture, or when both modalities were considered. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that, under more naturalistic elicitation conditions, planning descriptions of instrument events is more heavily affected by language-specific encoding than conceptual prominence of the roles.

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n=59million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English.Next, two pre-registered text generation experiments (n=280) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the \textit{magic spell hypothesis}, we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the \textit{copy-and-edit hypothesis}, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch.From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language towards communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law's complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law's authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a law and policy perspective, these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.

Aspectual coercion occurs when there is a semantic mismatch between constituents in terms of their lexical aspect. Despite the long psycholinguistic history of this phenomenon, we currently lack direct measures of how people interpret coerced sentences. We introduce a novel method combining aspectual comprehension with event cognition, allowing us to detect changes in how individuals construe events after reading sentences with varying aspectual information. This study involved two experiments where participants read sentences—either telic or atelic, with or without coercion—followed by a video clip related to the sentence. They assessed if the actor completed the task and identified any brief interruptions during the event, located at the midpoint or late points. The focus was on whether coerced sentences altered participants' event construals, impacting their responses. Results uncovered distinct cognitive responses to aspectual coercion and highlighted differences between coercion types. This method advances our understanding of how lexical aspect influences event representation, offering insights into the nuanced effects of aspectual coercion on cognitive processing and event perception.

This study investigates the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing in olfaction. It focuses on how odor recognition is impacted after individuals sniffed and then described odors. Three key findings emerged. First, participants who refrained from describing a previously encountered target odor (control group) showed significantly superior performance in recognizing the target odor compared to those who had described it (verbal group). Second, the verbal overshadowing effect tended to diminish or completely disappear when participants were required to respond rapidly. Third, providing participants with instructions highlighting potential conflicts between olfactory and verbal representations did not alleviate the influence of the verbal overshadowing effect. To conclude, describing an odor elaborately can adversely affect odor memory, even when one is aware of this, but this is mitigated under speeded conditions.

Construal Level Theory (CLT) suggests that we represent objects close to us in a concrete and modal fashion, and that representations become more abstract and amodal with increasing distance from ourselves. Evidence for such an association of abstraction level and distance comes from the Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants are faster when pressing one key for “near” and “concrete” and another key for “far” and “abstract” targets (congruent), than when “near” is paired with “abstract” and “far” with “concrete” (incongruent). However, previous experiments might have confounded distance and abstraction by employing inherently near and far targets (e.g., CHAIR vs. SUN) that might also differ in their abstractness. Here, we thus experimentally induced different distances in a learning phase before a subsequent IAT task. Even with this controlled distance manipulation, a pronounced congruency effect emerged, providing further support for an association of distance and abstraction level as suggested by CLT.

Entities in the spatial domain (objects) and the temporal domain (events) are characterized by parallel distinctions that are supported by a shared notion of individuation that runs across domains. This work investigates whether conceptual considerations of individuation are language-independent. We test speakers of English, which uses count-mass syntax and telicity to mark linguistic individuals in the nominal and verbal domain respectively, and Mandarin, which lacks these linguistic features. Our results throw light onto the nature of entity categories in the human mind: both English-speaking and Mandarin-speaking viewers process individuated and non-individuated entities differently, with only the former having a well-defined (temporal/spatial) structure with integrally-ordered, distinct parts. Crucially, these features of non-linguistic individuation are conceptualized in similar ways cross-linguistically and are potentially universal.

People often select only a few events when explaining what happened. What drives people's explanation selection? Prior research argued that people's explanation choices are affected by event normality and causal structure. Here, we propose a new model of these existing findings and test its predictions in a novel experiment. The model predicts that speakers value accuracy and relevance. They choose explanations that are true, and that communicate useful information to the listener. We test the model's predictions empirically by manipulating what goals a listener has and what actions they can take. Across twelve experimental conditions, we find that our model accurately predicts that people like to choose explanations that communicate optimal interventions

Simulating sampling algorithms with people has proven a useful method for efficiently probing and understanding their mental representations. We propose that the same methods can be used to study the representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). While one can always directly prompt either humans or LLMs to disclose their mental representations introspectively, we show that increased efficiency can be achieved by using LLMs as elements of a sampling algorithm. We explore the extent to which we recover human-like representations when LLMs are interrogated with Direct Sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We found a significant increase in efficiency and performance using adaptive sampling algorithms based on MCMC. We also highlight the potential of our method to yield a more general method of conducting Bayesian inference with LLMs.

Building on counterfactual theories of causal-selection, according to which humans intuitively evaluate the causal responsibility of events, we developed an experimental paradigm to examine the effect of causal-selection explanations on abductive causal inference. In our experiment, participants attempted to infer the rule responsible for winning outcomes of random draws from urns with varying sampling probabilities.Participants who were provided with causal-selection judgments as explanations for the outcomes made significantly closer inferences to the rule than those relying on observations alone, or on other explanations of causal relevance.We mirror these empirical results with a computational model of inference from explanation leveraging the theories of causal selection.

It is uncontroversial that humans can represent possibilities, but it is debated what this claim amounts to. Under broad views of modal cognition, many representational and reasoning systems represent possibilities at multiple levels of cognitive architecture. Under narrow views of modal cognition, there exists a special kind of higher-level modal thought, that can be measured with purpose built non-verbal modal cognition tasks. Here we ask whether object tracking mechanisms that are assumed to lack the higher-level narrow modal capacity, show behavioral signatures that are assumed to require it. We find signature of modal representation in one task, but not another. The finding suggests that there is no clear difference between tasks that tap broad and narrow modal cognition, and invites a reassessment of the evidence for the latter.

In our cross-cultural corpus study of 332 comics, we asked whether animacy preference plays a role in comics. Are animates or inanimates more or less grammatically marked compared to each other, similarly to differential marking modulated by animacy in grammars of many languages? Following Opfer (2002), we considered the animacy preference as the expectation that only animates move in a goal-directed way. We focused on two visual morphological markings that indicate motion in comics and differ in their goal-directedness: the goal-directed motion lines (trailing a moving entity) and the non-goal-directed circumfixing lines (surrounding an entity). We found that inanimates are more marked by motion lines than animates in our data, while there is no difference between the two groups with circumfixing lines. This indicates that inanimates need to be marked by motion lines in order to signal their goal-directed movement, which is otherwise unexpected. We call this the principle of “Mark the unexpected!”.

Languages tend to describe who is doing what to whom by placing subjects before objects. This bias for agents is reflected in event cognition: agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is unique to humans. We presented Guinea baboons (Papio papio, N = 13) with a change detection paradigm with chasing animations. The baboons had to respond to a colour change which was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which cannot be explained by low-level features in our stimuli. Our study suggests that baboons show an agent preference similar to human infants and adults. This may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates, which could have become externalised in language as a tendency to place the subject first.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is entrusted with the responsibility of safeguarding global peace and security. Prominent global security concerns will be deliberated upon, and viewpoints will be presented within the UNSC. Analyzing the cognitive patterns from UNSC debates helps scholars gain insights into the intricacies of international relations and diplomatic discourse. In this study, our focus lies in the cognitive analysis of debates held within the UNSC. We employ metaphors and their associated concept mappings as a methodological tool to dissect the cognitive nuances present in the debates, spanning from January 1995 to December 2020. To undertake this extensive analysis from a large volume of documents, we leverage MetaPro, a state-of-the-art computational metaphor processing system to obtain the concept mappings of metaphors. We analyze cognitive variations by temporal and geographical variables. We also demonstrate the correlation between metaphor-reflected cognition and diplomatic behavior, and their recursive influence, based on large sample research. Our major finding highlights the mutual impacts of metaphorical cognition and voting behavior at the UN.

Although space helps children to grasp time, comprehending temporal metaphors remains challenging. Particularly, Mandarin has different degree of ambiguity in sagittal time-space metaphors, where ‘qian' (front/past) expresses both future-in-front and past-in-front mappings but ‘hou' (back/future) predominately expresses future-at-back mappings. Temporal metaphors with a longer duration unit (e.g., year vs. hour) also increase this challenge. We investigated: 1) when children understand sagittal time-space metaphors; 2) whether different degree of ambiguity leads children to having an asymmetric understanding of the past and future; 3) how the unit of temporal duration affects time understanding. 138 Mandarin-speaking children (3-5 years) undertook an 8-item sagittal time-space metaphors test. The results showed that age 5 is a milestone to understand sagittal time-space metaphors, and a longer unit of time duration and more ambiguous space-time metaphors hinder children's time comprehension. This study reveals the development of time cognition in non-western children and demonstrates how language impacts cognition.

Mandarin speakers have different space-time mappings than English speakers, but how Mandarin-speaking children spatialize time is unknown. We explored the development of 3D time-space representations in Chinese children aged 3 to 5. 145 Mandarin-speaking children, divided into three conditions (Exp1: horizontal, vertical, and Exp2: sagittal axes), undertook an MTL task for ten picture stories. We analysed their choices in 3-step temporal events, intending to test their sequential and directional preference of time (e.g., order vs. disorder; left-to- right vs. right-to-left). The results showed that Chinese children acquired sequential temporal representations on the horizontal and vertical axes at age 4, similar to English-speaking children. However, their directional preferences appeared earlier than English children (Exp1). Furthermore, the sagittal axis had different patterns: sequentiality emerged only at age 5, but directional preference still has not emerged in the whole 3- 5age group.These findings emphasize that language and culture impact children's conceptualization of time.

One of the core properties of human language is compositionality: the meaning of a sentence can be understood by the meaning of individual words and the rules for combining them (Szabó, 2020). We investigate the development of conceptual compositionality (the combination of concepts). In our study, 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 40) were shown a card with two objects (e.g., a car and a star). Participants were introduced to two characters (a robot and a wizard) that used their powers to change the objects in different ways (e.g., turning one object pink). In the test trials, participants were asked to predict what a card would look like after both characters used their powers on the same card. All participants successfully learned the characters' powers, but only participants 7.5 years and older succeeded in the compositionality test trials. Our findings suggest that by age 7.5 children can successfully compose functions.

Language is fundamental in human cognition and communication, helping us to encode the world around us. Adjectives represent a linguistic form used extensively, particularly in the social domain. Adjectives vary in both their valence and their breadth (e.g., “punctual” is narrower than “dependable”). Variations in adjectival breadth have not been studied extensively but may have significant consequences across various domains. The present study explores how subtle distinctions in adjective use may relate to descriptions of experiences that people share. To assess linguistic breadth in online communication, we examine whether online reviews with different star ratings are associated with differences in adjectival breadth. Through an analysis of over 200,000 reviews from Amazon digital music (Study 1) and Yelp restaurants (Study 2), we find evidence that linguistic desirability and breadth of adjectives in reviews positively correlate with their ratings. Specifically, higher-rated reviews tend to use broader and more desirable adjectives. However, this relationship varies between product categories, with high-rated music reviews showing increased linguistic breadth and desirability, while top-rated restaurant reviews demonstrate a decrease in breadth. This paper contributes to understanding linguistic breadth in social media contexts, highlighting how subtle language variations in evaluations can reflect different cognitive and communicative processes.

Humans are surrounded by dynamic, continuous streams of stimuli, yet the human mind segments these stimuli and organizes them into discrete event units. Theories of language production assume that segmenting and construing an event provides a starting point for speaking about the event (Levelt, 1989; Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2018). However, the precise units of event representation and their mapping to language remain elusive. In this work, we examine event unit formation in linguistic and conceptual event representations. Given cross-linguistic differences in motion event encoding (satellite vs. verb-framed languages), we investigate the extent to which such differences in forming linguistic motion event units affect how speakers of different languages form cognitive event units in non-linguistic tasks. We test English (satellite-framed) and Turkish (verb-framed) speakers on verbal and non-verbal motion event tasks. Our results show that speakers do not rely on the same event unit representations when verbalizing motion vs. identifying motion event units in non-verbal tasks. Therefore, we suggest that conceptual and linguistic event representations are related but distinct levels of event structure.

Questions combine our mastery of language with our remarkable facility for reasoning about uncertainty. How do people navigate vast hypothesis spaces to pose informative questions given limited cognitive resources? We study these tradeoffs in a classic grounded question-asking task based on the board game Battleship. Our language-informed program sampling (LIPS) model uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language questions, translate them into symbolic programs, and evaluate their expected information gain. We find that with a surprisingly modest resource budget, this simple Monte Carlo optimization strategy yields informative questions that mirror human performance across varied Battleship board scenarios. In contrast, LLM-only baselines struggle to ground questions in the board state; notably, GPT-4V provides no improvement over non-visual baselines. Our results illustrate how Bayesian models of question-asking can leverage the statistics of language to capture human priors, while highlighting some shortcomings of pure LLMs as grounded reasoners.

The literature on conceptual combination has thus far been limited to research at the aggregate level investigating adjective-noun and noun-noun combinations. One well-established phenomenon within this literature is that of concept dominance (Hampton, 1988), which is the finding that the relative contribution of constituent concepts (for example sport or game) to their conjunction (sport that is also a game) is often very unequal. This exploratory study investigated individual differences in how people understand adjective-adjective-noun combinations, such as long blue coat. Participants rated images of coats varying along the perceptual dimensions of length and color for typicality in two different conjunctions, namely long blue coat and long purple coat. We used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to construct an aggregate coat space from similarity data collected with the Spatial Arrangement Method (SpAM). Using external unfolding, we modeled participants' typicality judgements by representing their individual typicality data as vectors within the aggregate MDS space, such that orthogonal projections from the coats onto the vectors represent their perceived typicality in the conjunctions. We did not find strong evidence for concept dominance at the aggregate level; however, we did find evidence for concept dominance at the individual level, with marked individual differences in the extent of dominance and which dimension was dominant. The validation of external unfolding for research into conceptual combination comes with new research possibilities, several of which are proposed.

How does globalization impact the interaction between perception and language? Building on Berlin and Kay's foundational study of color naming, we recruited 2,280 online participants speaking 22 different languages. We show that color naming maps differ structurally across languages, even among internet users living in (mostly) industrial societies. We use Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the limits of globalization by reproducing the naming task with a highly multilingual artificial agent with access to global digital information. We show that while the LLM has access to all languages, it has language-specific color representations and the number of color terms is correlated across humans and LLMs. However, LLMs use more color terms than humans, indicating differences in the representation. These results suggest that globalization has not removed cultural distinctions in color concepts, as language continues to be a key factor in the diversity of perception and meaning.

It is now well-established that the visual features of objects influence the sounds we make to refer to them. This is called sound symbolism. We present the results of a two-part study that explores the extent to which the visual features of writing systems correspond to the smallest spoken units of language. In Study 1, participants (n = 322) classified the shape of a set of glyphs, representative of the world's script families. The purpose was to create an open-source database of normed glyphs for future research in cognitive linguistics. In Study 2, participants (n = 73) were prompted to select either a round or angular glyph after hearing one of two kinds of phonemes (vowel or consonant) from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Results from a logistic regression suggest that the type of sound had a significant effect on the choice of glyph, and that vowel sounds increased the likelihood of choosing round glyphs by 30%. The significant correlation between what subjects heard and their choice of glyph suggests that the effect may extend to such sound symbolic relations in real-world writing systems. Our ongoing research seeks to substantiate these findings with increased glyph contrast and more diverse populations.

Recently the principles of efficient communication have provided useful characterizations of semantic typology: the diversity of attested languages can be described by competing pressures for simplicity and informativeness. While this approach has achieved success in several semantic domains, the formalizations used to define complexity across domains vary. In this note, we list the conditions under which the two main approaches of defining complexity: channel rate and description length, unify and, thus, conclusions about near-optimal communicative efficiency generalize across formalizations. We illustrate this equivalence using simulations of communicative efficiency for Boolean concepts. We round out this note discussing the (un)importance of description languages and the limits on generalizing this equivalence for other behavioral targets for explanation.

The present study examines how natural language aptitude subskills predict individual differences in learning Python and Java. Past work has demonstrated that overall performance on the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT), a standardized measure of language aptitude, is a strong predictor of both the speed and accuracy with which individuals learn Python. However, language aptitude is a broad multidimensional construct made up of individual subskills. In the present study, we examine how two of these subskills - sensitivity to form and meaning mapping - relate to programming outcomes in both Python and Java. Results indicate that both sensitivity to form (MLAT IV) and meaning mapping (MLAT V) are related to programming acquisition in both languages - this relationship remains even after controlling for fluid intelligence. We also examined how programming skills tied to semantics and syntax related between Python and Java in a subset of learners who learned both languages. These results demonstrated that proficiency in Python predicted individual differences in both syntactic and semantic knowledge in Java. Taken together, these results further elucidate the role of natural language aptitude in programming learning and suggest that semantic and syntactic content may transfer across programming languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs), which match or exceed human performance on many linguistic tasks, are nonetheless commonly criticized for not “understanding” language. These critiques are hard to evaluate because they conflate “understanding” with reasoning and common sense—abilities that, in human minds, are dissociated from language processing per se. Here, we instead focus on a form of understanding that is tightly linked to language: mapping sentence structure onto an event description of “who did what to whom” (thematic roles). Whereas LLMs can be directly trained to solve to this task, we asked whether they naturally learn to extract such information during their regular, unsupervised training on word prediction. In two experiments, we evaluated sentence representations in two commonly used LLMs—BERT and GPT-2. Experiment 1 tested hidden representations distributed across all hidden units, and found an unexpected pattern: sentence pairs that had opposite (reversed) agent and patient, but shared syntax, were represented as more similar than pairs that shared the same agent and same patient, but differed in syntax. In contrast, human similarity judgments were driven by thematic role assignment. Experiment 2 asked whether thematic role information was localized to a subset of units and/or to attention heads. We found little evidence that this information was available in hidden units (with one exception). However, we found attention heads that reflected thematic roles independent of syntax. Therefore, some components within LLMs capture thematic roles, but such information exerts a much weaker influence on their sentence representations compared to its influence on human judgments.

Literary and aesthetic studies have suggested that readers can stay in indeterminate states where they hold multiple interpretations, and that this indeterminate interpretation state causes an aesthetic feeling, involvement, and understanding of art. To explore the indeterminate interpretation state, we employed a quantum cognition framework and conducted a reading experiment using a short story. The results suggest that readers' interpretations can be regarded as a superposition state corresponding to the indeterminate and polysemous interpretation of the story. We also estimated a time series of quantum indeterminacy and discussed the text features related to quantum indeterminacy.

This study explores how L1 and L2 Chinese speakers use world knowledge and classifier information to predict fine-grained referent features. In a visual-world-paradigm eye-tracking experiment, participants were presented with two visual objects that were denoted by the same noun in Chinese but matched different shape classifiers. Meanwhile, they heard sentences containing world knowledge triggering context and classifiers. The effect of world knowledge has been differentiated from word-level associations. Native speakers generated anticipations about the shape/state features of the referents at an early processing stage and quickly integrated linguistic information with world knowledge upon hearing the classifiers. In contrast, L2 speakers show delayed, reduced anticipation based on world knowledge and minimal use of classifier cues. The findings reveal different cue-weighting strategies in L1 and L2 processing. Specifically, L2 speakers whose first languages lack obligatory classifiers do not employ classifier cues in a timely manner, even though the semantic meanings of shape classifiers are accessible to them. No evidence supports over-reliance on world knowledge in L2 processing. This study contributes to the understanding of L2 real-time processing, particularly in L2 speakers' utility of linguistic and non-linguistic information in anticipating fine-grained referent features.

How, and how strongly, do default comprehension inferences shape verbal reasoning? When do they lead to fallacies? We address these questions for reasoning with polysemous verbs (verbs with distinct, but related senses) and ask when their use leads to fallacies of equivocation. The ‘linguistic salience bias hypothesis' specifies conditions where subordinate uses of unbalanced polysemes trigger defeasible default inferences that are supported only by the dominant sense but influence further cognition, regardless. But does this happen even where the verb is preceded by disambiguating context that invites subordinate interpretations from the start? We present three experimental-philosophy studies that address this question: We use the psycholinguistic cancellation paradigm and fixation time measurements to examine inferences from polysemous appearance verbs. We find that default inferences can beat even preceding contextual information. Beyond their psycho-linguistic interest, findings have important philosophical consequences.

This study investigates whether linguistic influences can affect the manifestation of lateral space-valence mappings in people's minds. Although most oral languages and cultures of the world have expressions and conventions that associate the good with the right space, this association seems to be body- specific: while right-handers associate positive concepts with the right side and negative concepts with the left side, left- handers have the oppositive association, and the size of the effect of the body specificity does not vary with linguistic and cultural conventions. Thus, it is widely believed that this conceptual metaphor only depends on the body. However, sign languages do not seem to have any conventional association between lateral space and valence, and a recent study has shown that signers do not associate valence with lateral space, opening the possibility of a causal influence of language. The present study set to replicate this surprising and controversial finding by comparing a sign language group, consisting of Spanish and Chinese Sign Language users, and an oral Spanish control group on the widely applied “Bob” task in this field. Supporting prior findings, Spanish language participants associated the “good” with their dominant side of space, closely matching the anticipated proportion, but signers did not. This pattern of results can be explained by a strong linguistic influence on the formation of lateral associations of emotional valence, but we discuss some alternative possibilities.

A speaker's use of language is one of the most important indicators in detecting deception. To date, however, little research has focused on grammatical cues used in deceitful statements. One such cue is evidentiality which is the grammatical encoding for the source of information; i.e., whether the speaker has direct or indirect access to what they assert. This study investigates whether and how evidentiality coding in Turkish, an evidential language, interacts with producing deceitful and truthful narratives. Deceptive retellings were notably longer and syntactically more complex compared to truthful counterparts. Our hypothesis of increased past forms in deception was confirmed, alongside a heightened use of direct evidential inflection (–DI) in deceptive conditions. This exploration sheds light on the nuanced relationship between grammatical evidentiality and deceptive language use.

Is it tautological to call an action “wrongful discrimination?” Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term “discrimination” is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that “discrimination” usually conveys the action's moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of “discriminatory” is a thing of the past.

People have strong intuitions about which colors do and do not match particular pieces of music — a phenomenon often conceptualized through semantic mediation. We further explored the specific strategies people employ to navigate these color-music associations which offers crucial insights to identifying the cognitive mechanisms that enable such cross-domain associations. We show that while some people rely more on intuition, other people actively seek justification of association by consulting common linguistic descriptors, emotional contents, and environmental cues. We found that more spontaneous strategies lessen the role of semantic mediation, while more evaluative strategies, especially those involving the use of language, amplify it. Notably, the use of evaluative strategies introduced an asymmetrical effect for matching and mismatching colors. Additionally, individuals employing similar strategies associated a given music excerpt with more similar colors, suggesting that strategy alignment enhances the consistency of color-music associations. Interestingly, this pattern of convergence was not observed among individuals who predominantly relied on guessing.

In logical theories of meaning, threshold and prototype models are two distinctive formal approaches. In cognitive science literature, however, where the two models are operationalized, there is support for the use of a threshold model in categorization (Schmidt, Goodman, Barner, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Ramotowska, Haaf, Van Maanen, & Szymanik, 2022) as well as sup- port for the prototype model (Douven, 2016; Douven, Wenmackers, Jraissati, & Decock, 2017), and in many cases the two models are used interchangeably (Kruschke, 2008). We test for the case of relative gradable adjectives whether a) there is a difference between predicted degrees of membership from the two models when relying on explicit reports of threshold and prototype values, and b) which of the models better pre- dicts behavioral data from categorization tasks. Results suggest that prototype and threshold models are highly predictive of behaviour in a categorization task and that the two models yield similar results with a slight advantage of the threshold model.

Does language help make sense of the visual world? How important is it to actually see the world rather than having it described with words? These basic questions about the nature of intelligence have been difficult to answer because we only had one example of an intelligent system -- humans -- and limited access to cases that isolated language or vision. However, the development of sophisticated Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by artificial intelligence researchers offers us new opportunities to explore the contributions that language and vision make to learning about the world. We ablate components from the cognitive architecture of these models to identify their contributions to learning new tasks from limited data. We find that a language model leveraging all components recovers a majority of a VLM's performance, despite its lack of visual input, and that language seems to allow this by providing access to prior knowledge and reasoning.

In this pre-registered study, we investigated whether emotional inner speech influences heart rate. Participants were asked to engage in 3-minute sessions of: positive inner speech, negative inner speech, or inner counting while their heart rate was monitored. Participants were lying on a bed and asked to remain still. Motion tracking was applied to control for body movement. Median heart rate across each inner speech session was analyzed and a significant difference was found between emotional inner speech and inner counting. No difference between positive and negative inner speech was observed. Post-hoc analyses investigated the relationship between movement and heart rate and found an effect with a peak lag of approximately 14 seconds. Removing these effects did not change the effect of emotional inner speech. Additional analyses showed that heart rate and respiration rate were linked. Including respiration rate as a covariate did not alter the effect of emotion.

The verbal overshadowing effect, a phenomenon where verbal descriptions of an encoded face hinder subsequent recognition, has been linked to the similarity in facial image sets used in recognition tasks. However, the specific aspects of similarity that influence this effect remained underexplored. This study, therefore, employed the Stable Diffusion image-generation model to create image sets that are similar either verbally or nonverbally. Experimental results using these sets revealed the presence of the verbal overshadowing effect in the verbally-similar set, but it was not evident in the nonverbally-similar set. These findings align with existing explanations of the verbal overshadowing effect and contribute to enhancing its predictability.

Question-asking, an essential yet understudied activity, holds significant implications for fields such as learning, creativity, and cognitive development. The quality, and complexity in particular, of the questions are recognized as crucial factors affecting these fields. Previous research explored question complexity through Bloom's taxonomy, but measurement remains challenging. Recent advancements have enabled automated scoring of psychological tasks but have not been applied to open-ended question complexity. Here, we address this gap by employing large language model (LLM) techniques to predict human ratings of open-ended question complexity. Our results reveal that our LLM-generated complexity scores correlated strongly with human complexity ratings in both the holdout-responses (r = .73) and holdout-item set (r = .77), whilst also exceeding baseline methods tested. The research emphasizes the significance of LLMs in psychological research and their potential in automating question complexity assessment. This study also highlights exciting possibilities for usage of LLMs in education and psychology.

Humans make sense of space in a variety of ways. We can locate the world relative to our bodies, for instance, and thus adopt an 'egocentric' frame of reference for space. Or we can locate the world relative to an external frame of reference --- the cardinal directions, perhaps, or salient geographical features such as mountains. Across contexts and cultures, people vary in the frame of reference they adopt to think and communicate about space. Here, we test an explanation of this diversity: Egocentric encoding is encouraged by dense urban environments, particularly when reasoning about small-scale space. We constructed a corpus of three decades of published studies of cross-cultural variation in spatial frames of reference (N > 7,000 participants). Multilevel Bayesian models confirmed that egocentric encoding is more common in cities (vs. rural environments) and for small-scale space. Our conceptualization of space is shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

Texts available on the Web have been generated by human minds. We observe that simple patterns are over-represented: abcdef is more frequent than arfbxg and 1000 appears more often than 1282. We suggest that word frequency patterns can be predicted by cognitive models based on complexity minimization. Conversely, the observation of word frequencies offers an opportunity to infer particular cognitive mechanisms involved in their generation.

Research in lexical acquisition has frequently focused on children's ability to make rapid, context-informed guesses about the meaning of newly encountered words, known as ‘fast mapping'. However, there is a gap in research examining how children and adults revise and adjust these guesses about word meanings as they encounter words repeatedly applied to different referents. We propose, on computational grounds, that learners adjust word meanings incrementally to accommodate new evidence. To begin to test this proposal, we lay out a new research program probing how word meanings evolve. In a pilot experiment, adults learn the meaning of novel kinship terms and we probe their beliefs by repeatedly eliciting generalizations. We manipulate the order in which participants observe the same word used to refer to different members of a family tree. We find a mixed pattern of order effects but our inspection of individual trajectories suggestive of a syntax-level relationship between the current and previous hypothesis. This relationship was supported by a computational model based analysis of lexical meaning generation via a probabilistic language of thought.

Language represents a framework used to organize the things we experience. Redundant linguistic category labels facilitate category learning at a faster rate than category learning without labels (Luypan et al., 2007) suggesting language is also meaningfully involved in forming new categories. However, labels are not exclusively advantageous. Brojde et al., (2011) demonstrates that labels can be detrimental to category learning dependent on attending to historically agnostic dimensions over historically diagnostic ones (i.e., learning texture-based categories while ignoring shape). To separate historical experience from novel category learning, we task participants with classifying stimuli based on perceptual dimensions with less historical precedence as diagnostic cues for categorizing objects in everyday life (i.e., orientation and spatial frequency). Our results reveal a labeling advantage as well as slower overall learning in the orientation condition compared to spatial frequency-based learning. We discuss implications involving the historical use of these dimensions and the relationship between diagnostic and non-diagnostic dimensions.

Empirical evidence shows that gendered languages influence speaker's perception of the gender of animate and inanimate nouns. In this framework, we aimed to explore whether gram-matical gender can override gender stereotypes. One hundred fourteen native Greek speakers whose second language was English were asked to match stereotypically male- and female-associated nouns presented in Greek or in their English trans-lation with a male or female face. The nouns denoted agency and communality. Participants were presented with nouns both congruent and incongruent in terms of conceptual and gram-matical gender. Responses for both Greek and English nouns were provided consistently with gender stereotypes. Critically, although responses were not dominated by grammatical gender, for female-associated nouns, the presence of grammatically masculine gender reduced female responses. Moreover, participants assigned a male face faster for male-associated nouns than for female associated nouns irrespective of grammatical gender.

Memory for the QWERTY keyboard has been shown to be a good experimental paradigm to test the relationship between explicit and implicit memory as, despite high typing proficiency in young students nowadays, explicit knowledge of the keyboard seems to remain scarce. In our experiment, we investigate the relationship between implicit and explicit keyboard memory by asking participants to find the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet on a blank QWERTY keyboard (explicit task) and then perform a procedural (implicit) task by typing short paragraphs. Results showed significantly lower explicit (compared to implicit) accuracy. To investigate the role of linguistic context in the implicit task, we compared these results with a subset from Experiment 1 in Ianì et al. (2024), who used a single letter procedural task, illustrating a decline in implicit performance between the two experiments. Our findings suggest the importance of linguistic and sensorimotor contextual factors for procedural knowledge.