Many important problems require consideration of multiple constraints, such as choosing a job based on salary, location, and responsibilities. We used the Remote Associates Test to study how people solve such multiply-constrained problems by asking participants to make guesses as they came to mind. We evaluated how people generated these guesses…

A major open question in natural language research is the role of communicative efficiency in the origin and on-line processing of language structures. Here, we use word pairs like "chimp/chimpanzee", which differ in length but have nearly identical meanings, to investigate the communicative properties of lexical systems and the communicative…

Most words are associated with multiple senses. A DVD can be round (when describing a disc), and a DVD can be an hour long (when describing a movie), and in each case DVD means something different. The possible senses of a word are often predictable, and also constrained, as words cannot take just any meaning: for example, although a movie can be…

Numerous recent studies suggest that human learners, including both infants and adults, readily track sequential statistics computed between adjacent elements. One such statistic, transitional probability, is typically calculated as the likelihood that one element predicts another. However, little is known about whether listeners are sensitive to…

Speakers are faster and more accurate at processing certain sound sequences within their language. Does this reflect the fact that these sequences are frequent or that they are phonetically less complex (e.g., easier to articulate)? It has been difficult to contrast these two factors given their high correlation in natural languages. In this…

Embedded hierarchical structures, such as "the rat the cat ate was brown", constitute a core generative property of a natural language theory. Several recent studies have reported learning of hierarchical embeddings in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, and described the functional specificity of Broca's area for processing such structures.…

Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3-…