Preschool children generate quantity inferences from both words and pictures.

As children learn to communicate with others, they must develop an understanding of the principles that underlie human communication. Recent evidence suggests that adults expect communicative principles to govern all forms of communication, not just language, but evidence about children's ability to do so is sparse. This study investigated whether preschool children expect both pictures and words to adhere to the communicative principle of quantity using a simple matched paradigm. Children (N = 293) aged of 3 to 5 years (52.5% male and 47.5% female; majority White with college-educated mothers) participated. Results show that children as young as 3.5 years can use the communicative principle of quantity to infer meaning across verbal and pictorial alternatives.

Events and objects are similar cognitive entities.

Logico-semantic theories have long noted parallels between the linguistic representation of temporal entities (events) and spatial entities (objects): bounded (or telic) predicates such as fix a car resemble count nouns such as sandcastle because they are "atoms" that have well-defined boundaries, contain discrete minimal parts and cannot be divided arbitrarily. By contrast, unbounded (or atelic) phrases such as drive a car resemble mass nouns such as sand in that they are unspecified for atomic features. Here, we demonstrate for the first time the parallels in the perceptual-cognitive representation of events and objects even in entirely non-linguistic tasks. Specifically, after viewers form categories of bounded or unbounded events, they can extend the category to objects or substances respectively (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, in a training study, people successfully learn event-to-object mappings that respect atomicity (i.e., grouping bounded events with objects and unbounded events with substances) but fail to acquire the opposite, atomicity-violating mappings (Experiment 3). Finally, viewers can spontaneously draw connections between events and objects without any prior training (Experiment 4). These striking similarities between the mental representation of events and objects have implications for current theories of event cognition, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Keeping quantifier meaning in mind: Connecting semantics, cognition, and pragmatics.

A complete theory of the meaning of linguistic expressions needs to explain their semantic properties, their links to non-linguistic cognition, and their use in communication. Even though in principle interconnected, these areas are generally not pursued in tandem. We present a novel take on the semantics-cognition-pragmatics interface. We propose that formal semantic differences in expressions' meanings lead those meanings to activate distinct cognitive systems, which in turn have downstream effects on when speakers prefer to use those expressions. As a case study, we focus on the quantifiers "each" and "every", which can be used to talk about the same state of the world, but have been argued to differ in meaning. In particular, we adopt a mentalistic proposal about these quantifiers on which "each" has a purely individualistic meaning that interfaces with the psychological system for representing object-files, whereas "every" has a meaning that implicates a group and interfaces with the psychological system for representing ensembles. In seven experiments, we demonstrate that this account correctly predicts both known and newly-observed constraints on how "each" and "every" are pragmatically used. More generally, this integrated approach to semantics, cognition, and pragmatics suggests that canonical patterns of language use can be affected in predictable ways by fine-grained differences in semantic meanings and the cognitive systems to which those meanings connect.

Representing agents, patients, goals and instruments in causative events: A cross-linguistic investigation of early language and cognition.

Although it is widely assumed that the linguistic description of events is based on a structured representation of event components at the perceptual/conceptual level, little empirical work has tested this assumption directly. Here, we test the connection between language and perception/cognition cross-linguistically, focusing on the relative salience of causative event components in language and cognition. We draw on evidence from preschoolers speaking English or Turkish. In a picture description task, Turkish-speaking 3-5-year-olds mentioned Agents less than their English-speaking peers (Turkish allows subject drop); furthermore, both language groups mentioned Patients more frequently than Goals, and Instruments less frequently than either Patients or Goals. In a change blindness task, both language groups were equally accurate at detecting changes to Agents (despite surface differences in Agent mentions). The remaining components also behaved similarly: both language groups were less accurate in detecting changes to Instruments than either Patients or Goals (even though Turkish-speaking preschoolers were less accurate overall than their English-speaking peers). To our knowledge, this is the first study offering evidence for a strong-even though not strict-homology between linguistic and conceptual event roles in young learners cross-linguistically.

Motion verbs and memory for motion events.

Language is assumed to affect memory by offering an additional medium of encoding visual stimuli. Given that natural languages differ, cross-linguistic differences might impact memory processes. We investigate the role of motion verbs on memory for motion events in speakers of English, which preferentially encodes manner in motion verbs (e.g., driving), and Greek, which tends to encode path of motion in verbs (e.g., entering). Participants viewed a series of motion events and we later assessed their memory of the path and manner of the original events. There were no effects of language-specific biases on memory when participants watched events in silence; both English and Greek speakers remembered paths better than manners of motion. Moreover, even when motion verbs were available (either produced by or heard by the participants), they affected memory similarly regardless of the participants' language: path verbs attenuated memory for manners of motion, but the reverse did not occur. We conclude that overt language affects motion memory, but these effects interact with underlying, shared biases in how viewers represent motion events.

Four-year-olds incorporate speaker knowledge into pragmatic inferences.

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same inference, known as a scalar implicature, does not arise when the sentence is spoken by someone with partial knowledge. Adults have been shown to derive scalar implicatures in accordance with the speaker's knowledge state, but in young children this ability is debated. Here, we revisit this question using a simple visual world paradigm. We find that both 4- and 5-year-olds successfully incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of scalar inferences. However, this ability does not generalize immediately to non-linguistic communicative contexts. These findings have important implications for the development of pragmatic abilities.

The Role of Speaker Knowledge in Children's Pragmatic Inferences.

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement "Some Xs Y" is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N = 32) but not 4-year-olds (N = 32) reliably connected statements of different logical strength (e.g., "The girl colored all/some of the star") to observers who were fully or partially informed. Four-year-olds' performance improved when observer knowledge could be assessed more easily (Experiment 2a, N = 25) but remained the same in a nonlinguistic version of Experiment 1 that preserved the epistemic requirements of the original study (Experiment 2b, N = 26). These findings have implications for the development of early communicative abilities.

Learning words from speakers with false beliefs.

During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we study young children's ability to successfully acquire a word from a speaker with a false belief; we also assess the same children's success on a traditional false belief attribution task. We show that the ability to consult the epistemic state of a speaker during word learning develops between the ages of three and five. We also show that false belief understanding in word-learning contexts proceeds similarly to standard belief-attribution contexts when the tasks are equated. Our data offer evidence for the development of mind-reading abilities during language acquisition.

The influence of labels and facts on children's and adults' categorization.

Language has been assumed to influence categorization for both adults and children but the precise role and potency of linguistic labels in category formation remains open. Here we explore how linguistic labels help fit objects into categories when relevant perceptual information is either ambiguous or inconsistent with the labels. We also ask how the effects of labels compare to those of other types of information such as facts. We presented 4-year-old children and adults with tasks in which they had to categorize a perceptually ambiguous natural-kind stimulus with one of two equidistant standards (Exp. 1 and 2) or group an ambiguous natural-kind stimulus into a category with a perceptually dissimilar standard (Exp. 3). Participants had access to labels (e.g., "This one is a lorp/pim"), observable facts (e.g., "This one has a long/short beak"), or unobservable facts (e.g., "This one drinks water/milk") that grouped the ambiguous stimulus with one of the standards. Both children and adults followed label- and fact-driven category boundaries for perceptually ambiguous stimuli (Exp. 1 and 2), and continued to do so even when the labels or facts pointed to perceptually incongruent categories (Exp. 3). These findings suggest a strong causal role for both labels and facts in categorization and have implications about theories of how categorization develops in children.

Boundedness supports children's event representations.

Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., draw a balloon) and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., draw balloons). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using exclusively nonlinguistic tasks and a sample of English-speaking children, we ask whether young learners use corresponding temporal notions to characterize event structure-that is, whether children represent events in cognition as bounded temporal entities with a specified endpoint or unbounded temporal units that could in principle extend indefinitely. We find that 4-5-year-old children in our sample compute boundedness during an event categorization task (Experiment 1) and distinguish event boundedness from event completion (Experiment 2). Furthermore, 4-5-year-olds in our sample evaluate interruptions at event endpoints versus midpoints differently-but only for events that are construed as bounded, presumably because in such construals, events truly culminate (Experiment 3). We conclude that young children represent events in terms of foundational and abstract temporal properties. These properties could support the acquisition of linguistic aspectual distinctions and further scaffold the way children conceptualize and process their dynamic experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Aspectual Processing Shifts Visual Event Apprehension.

What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., "Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds" vs. "Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds") can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well-defined endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events.

Asymmetries in encoding event roles: Evidence from language and cognition.

It has long been hypothesized that the linguistic structure of events, including event participants and their relative prominence, draws on the non-linguistic nature of events and the roles that these events license. However, the precise relation between the prominence of event participants in language and cognition has not been tested experimentally in a systematic way. Here we address this gap. In four experiments, we investigate the relative prominence of (animate) Agents, Patients, Goals and Instruments in the linguistic encoding of complex events and the prominence of these event roles in cognition as measured by visual search and change blindness tasks. The relative prominence of these event roles was largely similar-though not identical-across linguistic and non-linguistic measures. Across linguistic and non-linguistic tasks, Patients were more salient than Goals, which were more salient than Instruments. (Animate) Agents were more salient than Patients in linguistic descriptions and visual search; however, this asymmetrical pattern did not emerge in change detection. Overall, our results reveal homologies between the linguistic and non-linguistic prominence of individual event participants, thereby lending support to the claim that the linguistic structure of events builds on underlying conceptual event representations. We discuss implications of these findings for linguistic theory and theories of event cognition.

Signatures of individuation across objects and events.

The physical world provides humans with continuous streams of experience in both space and time. The human mind, however, can parse and organize this continuous input into discrete, individual units. In the current work, we characterize the representational signatures of basic units of human experience across the spatial (object) and temporal (event) domains. We propose that there are three shared, abstract signatures of individuation underlying the basic units of representation across the two domains. Specifically, individuated entities in both the spatial domain (objects) and temporal domain (bounded events) resist restructuring, have distinct parts, and do not tolerate breaks; unindividuated entities in both the spatial domain (substances) and the temporal domain (unbounded events) lack these features. In three experiments, we confirm these principles and discuss their significance for cognitive and linguistic theories of objects and events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Event representation at the scale of ordinary experience.

Weeks are divided into weekdays and weekends; years into semesters and seasons; lives into stages like childhood, adulthood, and adolescence. How does the structure of experience shape memory? Though much work has examined event representation in human cognition, little work has explored event representation at the scale of ordinary experience. Here, we use shared experiences - in the form of popular television shows - to explore how memories are shaped by event structure at a large scale. We find that memories for events in these shows exhibit several hallmarks of event cognition. Namely, we find that memories are organized with respect to their event structure (boundaries), and that beginnings and endings are better remembered at multiple levels of the event hierarchy simultaneously. These patterns seem to be partially, but not fully, explained by the perceived story-relevance of events. Lastly, using a longitudinal design, we also show how event representations evolve over periods of several months. These results offer an understanding of event cognition at the scale of ordinary human lives.

The pragmatics of foreign accents: The social costs and benefits of being a non-native speaker.

Speaking with a foreign accent has often been thought to carry several disadvantages. Here, we probe a potential social advantage of non-native compared to native speakers using spoken utterances that either obey or violate the pragmatic principle of Informativeness. In Experiment 1, we show that listeners form different impressions of native and non-native speakers with identical pragmatic behavior: in a context in which omitting information could be deceptive, people rated underinformative speakers more negatively on trustworthiness and interpersonal appeal compared to informative speakers, but this tendency was mitigated for speakers with foreign accents. Furthermore, this mitigating effect was strongest for less proficient non-native speakers who were presumably not fully responsible for their linguistic choices. In Experiment 2, social lenience for non-native speakers emerged even in a non-deceptive context. Contrary to previous studies, there was no consistent global bias against non-native speakers in either experiment, despite their lower intelligibility. Thus the fact that non-native speakers have imperfect control of the linguistic signal affects pragmatic inferences and social evaluation in ways that can lead to surprising social benefits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Relevance and the Role of Labels in Categorization.

Language has been shown to influence the ability to form categories. Nevertheless, in most prior work, the effects of language could have been bolstered by the fact that linguistic labels were introduced by the experimenter prior to the categorization task in ways that could have highlighted their relevance for the task. Here, we compared the potency of labels to that of other non-linguistic cues on how people categorized novel, perceptually ambiguous natural kinds (e.g., flowers or birds). Importantly, we varied whether these cues were explicitly presented as relevant to the categorization task. In Experiment 1, we compared labels, numbers, and symbols: One group of participants was told to pay attention to these cues because they would be helpful (Relevant condition), a second group was told that the cues were irrelevant and should be ignored (Irrelevant condition), and a third group was told nothing about the cues (Neutral condition). Even though task relevance affected overall reliance on cues during categorization, participants were more likely to use labels to determine category boundaries, compared to numbers or symbols. In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated and fine-tuned the advantage of labels in more stringent categorization tasks. These results offer novel evidence for the position that labels offer unique indications of category membership, compared to non-linguistic cues.

Encoding Motion Events During Language Production: Effects of Audience Design and Conceptual Salience.

We investigate the extent to which pragmatic versus conceptual factors can affect a speaker's decision to mention or omit different components of an event. In the two experiments, we demonstrate the special role of pragmatic factors related to audience design in speakers' decisions to mention conceptually "peripheral" event components, such as sources (i.e., starting points) in source-goal motion events (e.g., a baby crawling from a crib to a toybox). In particular, we found that pragmatic factors related to audience design could not only drive the decision to omit sources from mention, but could also motivate speakers to mention sources more often than needed. By contrast, speaker's decisions to talk about goals did not appear to be fundamentally driven by pragmatic factors in communication. We also manipulated the animacy of the figure in motion and found that participants in our studies treated both animate and inanimate source-goal motion events in the same way, both linguistically and in memory. We discuss the implications of our work for message generation across different communicative contexts and for future work on the topic of audience design.

Does changing the reference frame affect infant categorization of the spatial relation BETWEEN?

Past research has shown that variation in the target objects depicting a given spatial relation disrupts the formation of a category representation for that relation. In the current research, we asked whether changing the orientation of the referent frame depicting the spatial relation would also disrupt the formation of a category representation for that relation. Experiments 1 to 3 provided evidence that 6- and 7-month-olds formed a category representation for BETWEEN when a diamond shape was depicted in different locations between two vertical or horizontal reference bars during familiarization and in a novel location between the same orientation of bars during test. By contrast, in Experiment 4, same-age infants did not form a category representation for BETWEEN when the diamond shape was depicted between two vertical (or horizontal) bars during familiarization and between two horizontal (or vertical) bars during test. Moreover, in Experiment 5, 9- and 10-month-olds did form a category representation for BETWEEN when the orientation of the referent bars depicting the relation changed from familiarization to test. The findings suggest that the formation of category representations for spatial relations by infants is affected by changes to either target (figure) or referent (ground).

The Role of Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Computations.

In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some and possibly all dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("Not all dogs are mammals," known as a scalar implicature). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the semantic or pragmatic meaning of such utterances, yet the underlying reason for this variation is unknown. Drawing on theoretical models of scalar implicature derivation, we explore the hypothesis that the cognitive abilities of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) contribute to this observed variation. In Experiment 1, we show that individuals with better ToM are more likely to compute a scalar implicature and adopt the pragmatic meaning of an utterance; however, EF makes no unique contribution to scalar implicature comprehension after accounting for ToM. In Experiment 2, we replicate this finding and assess whether it generalizes to the comprehension of other pragmatic phenomena such as indirect requests (e.g., "It's hot in here" uttered to ask for something to be done) and metaphor (e.g., "to harvest courage"). This is the first evidence that differences in ToM are associated with pragmatic competence in neurotypical adults across distinct pragmatic phenomena.

From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning.

A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure.