Previous psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that sentence processing varies according to both syntactic and discourse context. However, a systematic investigation of how such contexts influence how the processor manages low-level representations of linguistic structure has yet to be carried out. In this paper, we conduct a series of…

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies…

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence. Linguistic…

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of "retrieval," whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither…

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive…

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in "electri[k]" - "electri[s]-ity." But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the…

General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory--the component of short-term memory used for temporary…

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition ("AoA") while controlling for frequency,…

It has long been believed across languages that the "Agent-First" strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the…

The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when "everything is…

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co-occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co-occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co-occurrences…

In order to learn the mappings from words to referents, children must integrate co-occurrence information across individually ambiguous pairs of scenes and utterances, a challenge known as cross-situational word learning. In machine learning, recent multimodal neural networks have been shown to learn meaningful visual-linguistic mappings from…