Identifying wordlike units in language is typically done by applying a battery of criteria, though how to weight these criteria with respect to one another is currently unknown. We address this question by investigating whether certain criteria are also used as cues for learning an artificial language--if they are, then perhaps they can be relied…

In language learning, learners engage with their environment, incorporating cues from different sources. However, in lab-based experiments, using artificial languages, many of the cues and features that are part of real-world language learning are stripped away. In three experiments, we investigated the role of positive, negative, and mixed…

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative…

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems…

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

The in-out effect refers to the tendency that novel words whose consonants follow an inward-wandering pattern (e.g., P-T-K) are rated more positively than stimuli whose consonants follow an outward-wandering pattern (e.g., K-T-P). While this effect appears to be reliable, it is not yet clear to what extent it generalizes to existing words in a…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

A word often expresses many different morphological functions. Which part of a word contributes to which part of the overall meaning is not always clear, which raises the question as to how such functions are learned. While linguistic studies tacitly assume the co-occurrence of cues and outcomes to suffice in learning these functions (Baer-Henney,…

Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent-first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent-first bias as a "best guess" of role assignment when they…

Cultural routines, such as reading and writing direction (script direction), channel attention orientation. Depending on one's native language habit, attention is biased from left-to-right (LR) or from right-to-left (RL). Here, we further document this bias, as it interacts with the spatial directionality that grounds time concepts. We used a…

This study investigates whether listeners' cue weighting predicts their real-time use of asynchronous acoustic information in spoken word recognition at both group and individual levels. By focusing on the time course of cue integration, we seek to distinguish between two theoretical views: the "associated" view (cue weighting is linked…

Statistical learning is a key concept in our understanding of language acquisition. Ample work has highlighted its role in numerous linguistic functions--yet statistical learning is not a unitary construct, and its consistency across different language properties remains unclear. In a meta-analysis of auditory-linguistic statistical learning…

When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic ("rote"), or more thoughtful ("reflective"). But do people notice when "others" are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and…

We investigated how two cues to contrast--beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting--affect comprehenders' cognitive load during processing of spoken referring expressions. In two visual-world experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity, or fit, with the local (sentence-level) referential context in…

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of…