Cognitive Science[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Pronoun Resolution in Turkish: The Interplay of Referential Form, Word Order, and Implicit Causality.
Sarısoy D, Evcen E, Hartshorne J
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42363774 · Full text
Pronouns are a ubiquitous part of discourse, but unusual in that their meaning is almost entirely determined by context. While early theorists hoped to explain pronouns based on a small number of simple principles, the l...
Pronouns are a ubiquitous part of discourse, but unusual in that their meaning is almost entirely determined by context. While early theorists hoped to explain pronouns based on a small number of simple principles, the last half-century of research has revealed a cornucopia of influences at the syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels. While there are currently a few popular theories, evaluating them is complicated by the complexity of the empirical situation, which is compounded by the fact that many popular experimental methods are incommensurate and are uninterpretable under one theory or another. Moreover, with a few notable examples, research has focused on English, and so the generalizability of results is uncertain. Here, we take a step toward a clear empirical foundation for theory, with a tightly controlled study of comprehension of overt and null pronouns in Turkish. We show that pronoun resolution in Turkish is influenced by verb type, word order, and referential form, though not always in ways predicted by existing theories. Our findings highlight the need for further cross-linguistic research and more careful experimental control in order to refine models of pronoun interpretation and better account for the interaction of syntactic and discourse factors.
What's in a Color?: Language, Synesthesia, and Categorical Perception.
Gentry H
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42363773 · Publisher ↗
Studies on synesthesia have revealed some advantages on discrimination, categorization, and identification tasks. There have also been studies on language's ability to boost performance on these same tasks. Are these two...
Studies on synesthesia have revealed some advantages on discrimination, categorization, and identification tasks. There have also been studies on language's ability to boost performance on these same tasks. Are these two effects related? In this paper, I argue that a plausible explanation of language's ability to boost performance on such tasks can be extended to synesthesia. In particular, I argue that category labels can reveal trends in perceptual data that allow for representational space to be dimensionally reduced. The transformation of representational space makes representations more categorical, facilitating lexical access and ultimately boosting performance in categorization, identification, and discrimination tasks. This account can be extended to explain how synesthetic color associations boost performance. Synesthetic colors also reveal trends in perceptual data that allow for dimensional transformation. The upshots of such a hypothesis are several. For one, it helps explain synesthesia's cognitive advantages. I supply experimental designs to test predictions made by the account. Second, and more broadly, this account extends cases of nonlinguistic categorical effects on representations. I close with a discussion of some implications for the debate over language and thought.
Reasoning Beyond Explicit Rules: Adults' and Children's Use of Closure Principles in Novel Cases.
Stegall J, Mikhail J, Nichols S … +1 more , Kushnir T
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42357843 · Publisher ↗
Learners often encounter situations where explicit rules fail to account for novel cases, leading to an underdetermination problem. One way to explore how learners navigate this uncertainty is to see if their inferences...
Learners often encounter situations where explicit rules fail to account for novel cases, leading to an underdetermination problem. One way to explore how learners navigate this uncertainty is to see if their inferences align with closure principles, through which a learner assumes that anything not explicitly prohibited is permitted, and anything not explicitly permitted is prohibited. Beyond permission and prohibition, normative inferences must also be made from and about a learner's obligations-not only what they can do, but what they must do. Contrary to adult learners, young children may make more restrictive inferences about how permissible or obligatory a novel action is, aligning with their well-documented "strict normativity". Across two studies, we explore inferences from adults (N = 115, M = 34.63) and 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 120, M = 5.48). Our findings suggest that while both adults and children rationally learn closure principles consistent with deontic logic, children's reasoning about prohibitions undergoes developmental changes. Contrary to adults, children taught explicit prohibitions were restrictive in their permissibility judgments until age 5. Thus, the framing of explicit rules leads to differing inferences about novel, unspecified cases across age and rule type.
Intermediary Object States Are Activated by Sentences Describing Completed Events.
Wing E, Altmann GTM
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42357827 · Publisher ↗
Processing state change verb phrases (e.g., fill the cookie jar) during language comprehension appears to require the activation of representations encoding both the initial (an empty jar) and resultant states (a filled...
Processing state change verb phrases (e.g., fill the cookie jar) during language comprehension appears to require the activation of representations encoding both the initial (an empty jar) and resultant states (a filled jar) of event participants. Given that the transitions between these states can generally be inferred (on the basis of experiential semantic knowledge), these boundary states may be the only states of event participants that are activated during sentence processing or at event boundaries. However, simulation-based accounts of representation and linguistic analyses of state change predicates suggest that, in addition to initial and resultant object states, intermediary object states should also be activated during sentence comprehension. To compare these two alternatives, we investigated the activation of initial, intermediary, and end object states by sentences describing completed events (e.g., Jasmine filled/has filled the cookie jar). Our results suggest that perceptual features associated with objects at intermediary points in an event are indeed activated and maintained in memory through at least the end of the event description. These findings support an account in which representations of the entire event sequence-not just the boundaries-are activated during language processing.
Large Language Models Estimate Fine-Grained Human Color-Concept Associations.
Mukherjee K, Mohapatra A, Rogers TT … +1 more , Schloss KB
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42329828 · Full text
People reliably associate the meanings of both abstract and concrete words with colors distributed over color space, a phenomenon that influences aspects of visual cognition ranging from object recognition to interpretin...
People reliably associate the meanings of both abstract and concrete words with colors distributed over color space, a phenomenon that influences aspects of visual cognition ranging from object recognition to interpreting information visualizations. Prior research has hypothesized that color-concept associations arise from the cross-modal statistical structure of experience, but it remains unclear whether natural environments contain such structure or whether learning systems can discover it without strong prior constraints. To address these questions, we investigated whether GPT-4, a multimodal large language model, can estimate color-concept association ratings that approximate those made by people. We tested 71 colors spanning perceptual color space and a variety of concepts varying in abstractness. GPT-4 ratings correlated strongly with human ratings across a range of prompting strategies, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods for automatically estimating color-concept associations from images. In an empirical study assessing people's ability to interpret the meanings of colors in information visualizations, palettes generated from GPT-4's rating data were not only interpretable but, in some cases, more effective than those based on human ratings. Taken together, our results suggest that high-order covariance between language and perception, present in web-scale data, provide sufficient information to learn color-concept associations without initial constraints, and that machine-derived associations can support the optimization of information visualizations for visual communication.
Computational Models of Causal Reasoning: Bayesian Accounts of Normative Violations.
Rehder B, Marchant N, Chaigneau SE
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42306992 · Publisher ↗
Human causal judgments frequently deviate from normative Bayesian expectations, particularly with respect to conditional independence and explaining away. Rather than interpreting these deviations as reasoning errors, re...
Human causal judgments frequently deviate from normative Bayesian expectations, particularly with respect to conditional independence and explaining away. Rather than interpreting these deviations as reasoning errors, recent computational accounts suggest they may emerge from principled approximations to ideal Bayesian inference. We evaluate four leading frameworks: Bayesian sampler (BS), mutation sampler (MS), Bayesian mutation sampler (BMS), and Bayesian uncertainty model (BUM), which each formalize different cognitive constraints, including limited sampling, prototype anchoring, prior regularization, and uncertainty over causal structure. These models were systematically compared across 33 reported experimental conditions (N = 1154) spanning diverse causal structures, including common cause, common effect, and chain networks with generative and inhibitory relations. All four models had at least some success reproducing the positive and negative Markov violations observed in common cause and chain structures. In common effect structures with inhibitory or mixed links, only MS and BMS captured the observed patterns more consistently, although BMS's additional parameter offered limited improvement over MS. BS and BUM showed poorer fits in those conditions, though they may still offer plausible accounts under different assumptions. We discuss these findings in light of prior work on causal reasoning, emphasizing that deviations from normative inference may reflect adaptive strategies shaped by structural uncertainty and cognitive constraints. This supports a pluralistic and resource-rational view of causal reasoning and underscores the need for targeted experiments probing inhibitory causal relations and model uncertainty.
More Evidence for Perceptual Access Reasoning Theory: Reply to Schidelko and Rakoczy (2025).
Fabricius WV
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42306987 · Publisher ↗
The standard model of theory of mind (ToM) development holds that children normally acquire a representational ToM by about age 4 at the latest. Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) theory presents a fundamental challenge t...
The standard model of theory of mind (ToM) development holds that children normally acquire a representational ToM by about age 4 at the latest. Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) theory presents a fundamental challenge to the standard model by arguing that representational ToM does not develop until about age 7. One set of predictions of PAR theory concerns children's errors on certain true belief (TB) tasks. Schidelko and Rakoczy subscribe to the standard model, and report a test of the PAR account of TB errors versus their pragmatic account. The authors' preregistered predictions were not confirmed, and their publicly available data show that, contrary to their claims, the findings actually support the PAR account.
The Robustness of Anchoring in a Naturalistic VR-Based Task.
Wu J, Farmer G, Pready-James O … +1 more , Warren PA
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42298761 · Full text
Anchoring occurs when a quantitative estimate is biased toward an initially presented value (the anchor). Anchoring occurs both in high-level explicit estimation of numeric quantities and in lower-level perceptual tasks...
Anchoring occurs when a quantitative estimate is biased toward an initially presented value (the anchor). Anchoring occurs both in high-level explicit estimation of numeric quantities and in lower-level perceptual tasks and persists even when reliable information about the quantity being estimated is directly available at the point of judgment. This suggests anchoring might derive from generic processing underpinning estimation. Such tasks, however, are almost exclusively lab-based, and the information required to complete the task is rarely available to the participant in a way that reflects how such information is sampled in real-life. To address this, across two experiments, we immersed participants in a virtual world on a platform that could be placed at any height. After an anchor was presented, participants subsequently estimated their height naturally, by interpreting sensory and cognitive cues from the 3D environment in which they were immersed. We manipulated the amount of information directly available to the participant for making their judgment as well as the offset between the anchor and the actual height. To modulate the extent to which task-relevant information was acquired naturally from the environment, we also contrasted anchoring effects in and out of VR. Although participants clearly used the available perceptual and cognitive information to make height estimates, anchoring effects were evident, displayed similar properties to those reported in previous lab-based studies, and were consistent both in and out of VR. Our design also allowed us to recover a novel subjective anchoring measure that facilitated a particularly parsimonious descriptive model of our anchoring data. We conclude that anchoring is a generic feature of all estimation tasks, even when task-relevant information is acquired naturally, as in real-life estimation. These results emphasize the potential for this cognitive bias to have a significant impact on performance in any real-world task requiring quantitative estimation.
Functional Neural Architecture of Working Memory in Musicians: An ALE Meta-Analysis and Review.
Wolff L, Quan Y, Thompson WF … +1 more , Baumann O
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 42289269 · Full text
Musical expertise is often associated with enhanced cognitive abilities, underpinned by neural mechanisms unique to musicians. Research has provided evidence of associations between musical training and functional aspect...
Musical expertise is often associated with enhanced cognitive abilities, underpinned by neural mechanisms unique to musicians. Research has provided evidence of associations between musical training and functional aspects of cognition. However, the neural changes associated with musical expertise, particularly in relation to working memory, remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to examine differences in functional neural activity between musicians and non-musicians during working memory tasks. Meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) was conducted to explore broader networks of co-activation associated with regions of interest identified during the initial ALE meta-analysis. Nine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, including 228 participants (113 musicians and 115 non-musicians), were included in the final analysis. Musicians exhibited hyperactivations in the right medial frontal gyrus and hypoactivations across the right middle occipital gyrus, the right precentral gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule, the right claustrum, and the left cerebellum during working memory tasks. MACM revealed distributed networks of co-activation with links to various cognitive functions across regions of interest uncovered by the ALE analysis. Based on these findings, we propose that distinct functional networks and enhanced neural efficiency in musicians may support working memory performance across the lifespan. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition Psychology > Development and Aging Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development.
Measuring Children's Early Vocabulary in Low-Resource Languages Using a Swadesh-Style Word List.
Kachergis G, Tan AWM, Marchman VA … +2 more , Dale PS, Frank MC
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jun · PMID 42228544 · Publisher ↗
Early language skill is predictive of many later life outcomes and is thus of great interest to developmental psychologists and clinicians. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), parent report...
Early language skill is predictive of many later life outcomes and is thus of great interest to developmental psychologists and clinicians. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), parent report instruments typically containing inventories of hundreds of children's vocabulary words, have proven to be valid and reliable instruments for measuring children's early language skill. The CDIs have been adapted to many dozens of languages, and cross-linguistic comparisons show both consistency and variability in language acquisition trajectories. However, thousands of languages do not yet have CDIs, nor the early language corpora needed to create them, posing a significant barrier to increasing the diversity of languages that are studied. Here, we propose a method for selecting candidate words to include on new CDIs through analyzing psychometric properties of the translation-equivalent concepts that are frequently included on existing CDIs. Leveraging 32 datasets from existing CDIs, we propose a list of 100 concepts that have low variability in their cross-linguistic learning difficulty. This pool of common concepts-analogous to the Swadesh lists, which are basic vocabulary lists used in glottochronology for cross-language comparison-can be used as a starting point for future CDI adaptations. We show that the proposed Swadesh-CDI list generalizes well to data from 10 additional languages.
Collective Memory in Animals.
Bietti LM, Amici F
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 42219261 · Publisher ↗
Collective memory in humans refers to individual memories that become shared within a community and contribute to social identity, coordination, and cultural continuity. Extensive research shows that collective memory em...
Collective memory in humans refers to individual memories that become shared within a community and contribute to social identity, coordination, and cultural continuity. Extensive research shows that collective memory emerges through language-mediated interaction, social influence, and distributed cognitive mechanisms, supporting cooperation, decision-making, and cultural transmission. While these processes are well documented in humans, it remains unclear whether, and in what sense, collective memory exists in nonhuman animals. Here we propose a systematic comparative framework for understanding collective memory across species. We first outline the cognitive foundations of collective memory in humans, highlighting the roles of episodic, semantic, autobiographical, and procedural memory, together with mechanisms such as memory conformity, social contagion, memory convergence, transactive memory systems, and ritualized practices. We then examine whether nonhuman animals possess functional precursors of these mechanisms. Across taxa, animals exhibit episodic-like and semantic-like memory, social learning, conformity, distributed information systems, and ritualized behaviors that allow groups to store, transmit, and update knowledge beyond individual capacities. These processes support stable traditions, coordinated action, and adaptive responses. Although nonhuman animals show no evidence of autonoetic consciousness or human-like autobiographical memory, we argue that collective memory should be understood as a graded, non-dichotomous phenomenon grounded in distributed cognition.
Asymmetric Shape Variability Biases Proportion Judgments With Icon Arrays.
Markant DB
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42183632 · Publisher ↗
Icon arrays are graphical displays in which a subset of shapes are filled to represent the probability of an outcome (e.g., the probability of side-effects from a medical treatment). Prior work has shown that the percept...
Icon arrays are graphical displays in which a subset of shapes are filled to represent the probability of an outcome (e.g., the probability of side-effects from a medical treatment). Prior work has shown that the perceptions of probabilities can be more accurate with icon arrays compared to other formats. As a result, they are now widely used to communicate information about risk and uncertainty to the general public. However, little is known about how the design of icon arrays-in particular, the perceptual characteristics of icons and their spatial arrangement-affect perceptions of risk. The present study builds on research on visual perception which suggests that variation in icon shape may affect their perceived numerosity. Three experiments were conducted using a proportion judgment task with icon arrays that varied in (a) whether icons were organized in grouped or random configurations, and (b) whether there was variability in the icon shapes used to represent the target and nontarget proportions. The results show that proportion judgments are highly accurate for grouped arrays, with no effect of shape variability regardless of the distribution of shapes across the target and nontarget categories. For random spatial arrangements, however, irrelevant shape variability in one (but not both) of the categories leads to biased proportion judgments, increasing the perceived quantity of whichever category has elements with the same shape. These findings show that perceptual variation in shape-while irrelevant to the proportion judgment task-can alter how people perceive quantities depicted by icon arrays, providing new insight into how these visualizations should be designed to communicate information about risk.
What Counts as an Environment in Memory Research? Conceptualizing Environment Across Memory Traditions.
Huynh DC, Hussein AK, Fich LB … +1 more , Djebbara Z
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 42178693 · Publisher ↗
Research on memory and the physical environment has expanded across neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial cognition. Yet the literature remains conceptually diverse. A central reason is that the term enviro...
Research on memory and the physical environment has expanded across neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial cognition. Yet the literature remains conceptually diverse. A central reason is that the term environment is used to refer to different kinds of phenomena across traditions. In some studies, environment is treated as a broad category, such as natural versus urban. In others, it is defined through spatial and perceptual features, such as landmarks or space geometry. It is also understood as a contextual or event-related structure that becomes bound to experience and later supports retrieval. These approaches are often discussed separately, even when they address overlapping questions about memory. This review organizes the field into three broad traditions: category-based, feature-based, and context-based accounts. We show how each tradition foregrounds different environmental properties, memory systems, and mechanisms. Category-based work most often links environment to attention and working memory, feature-based work to navigation and spatial representation, and context-based work to episodic encoding and retrieval. By placing these traditions side by side, the review clarifies how the environment has been conceptualized in memory research and how different assumptions about environment shape the questions asked, the methods used, and the kinds of memory effects that become visible. The review further proposes that environment can be understood as contributing to memory in at least three roles: as structure, as navigational scaffold, and as cue. Together, these distinctions provide a structured account of a diverse field and identify directions for future work on the relationship between environment and memory.
Dual-EEG Reveals Adaptive Bilingual Language Control During Active and Observational Learning: Evidence From a Reinforcement Learning Model.
Ge F, Zhou Y, Wang X … +3 more , Li Y, Schwieter JW, Liu H
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42153478 · Publisher ↗
Language control is a cognitive ability that bilinguals use to suppress interference from the language they are not currently using to accurately select and use the intended language. Adaptive language control underpins...
Language control is a cognitive ability that bilinguals use to suppress interference from the language they are not currently using to accurately select and use the intended language. Adaptive language control underpins language switching and enables bilinguals to flexibly switch between languages according to context. Reinforcement learning, which models how individuals update their strategies based on reward prediction errors, provides a computational framework for studying adaptive behavior in changing environments. To investigate how bilingual language control is shaped by reward signals in social interactions, we used dual-electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the performance of bilinguals who alternated between active and observational learner roles in voluntary language switching tasks. Computational modeling results indicated that the dual-sensitivity model best captured behavior which showed that bilinguals adaptively updated values by assigning distinct weights to feedback from themselves and others. EEG analyses revealed that bilinguals relied on expected values during active learning and on prediction errors during observational learning to modulate delta band activity. Taken together, these findings reveal how rewards dynamically modulate language control through expected values and prediction errors, providing new evidence for the adaptability of bilingual control during social interaction.
Reframing Statistical Learning Through Natural Language Paradigms.
Marshall CR, Gullberg M
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42153474 · Publisher ↗
Scholars propose some new directions for researching statistical learning (SL), including the need to adopt stimuli with greater ecological validity. The language sciences are moving in these directions. Studies investig...
Scholars propose some new directions for researching statistical learning (SL), including the need to adopt stimuli with greater ecological validity. The language sciences are moving in these directions. Studies investigating adult SL after short exposure to an unfamiliar (spoken or signed) language show that SL can occur from richer, continuous, multimodal input, suggesting that learners are able to track multiple statistics. This makes it more plausible that SL operates in naturalistic, interactive situations. This paradigm shift can potentially extend our understanding of the exact ways in which SL is deployed in the service of learning languages, thereby refining it theoretically and clarifying its place in cognitive science.
Syntactic and Prosodic Phrasal Alignment in Naturalistic Language.
Bannon J, Hlachova B, Ferreira F
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42143756 · Full text
Prosody is an intrinsic element of language production, linking together multiple levels of linguistic representation to shape both the structure and interpretation of utterances. However, common theories of prosodic phr...
Prosody is an intrinsic element of language production, linking together multiple levels of linguistic representation to shape both the structure and interpretation of utterances. However, common theories of prosodic phrasing in spoken language often fail to capture factors associated with planning and recovery, as well as performance-based effects related to working memory. Much of what we know about prosody, whether it be the features speakers are thought to generate or the ones listeners are believed to process, is based on forms that are atypical in spoken language. Recent developments in data analysis methods, however, allow for the efficient study of unrehearsed spoken language. The current work aims to develop more ecologically valid theories of prosody and its relationship to syntactic structure through the analysis of unrehearsed scene descriptions. Data from unrehearsed speech collected across four different studies showed only a weak to moderate relationship between prosodic phrasing and syntactic structure, such that the likelihood of a prosodic phrase boundary occurring at the end of a syntactic phrase was only slightly above chance. Additionally, correlations between occurrences of prosodic phrase boundaries and speech rate revealed that individuals who speak more slowly are likely to insert more prosodic phrase boundaries, indicating a relationship between prosodic phrasing and speech planning. The findings challenge some categorical approaches to prosody and suggest that prosodic phrasing may be a consequence of planning and recovery in language production, rather than a complement to syntactic phrasing. These results have implications for theories of language production and comprehension, formal theories of phonological structure, and computational tools for generating and interpreting language.
Effects of Statistical Learning on Stimulus Detection Speed Reflect Attention Rather Than Representational Changes.
Sheinenson Y, Kleiman T, Siegelman N
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42143743 · Full text
Statistical learning (SL) is believed to enable humans to assimilate a range of statistical structures, and thus plays a role in many cognitive functions. There is also a growing interest in how SL interacts with basic c...
Statistical learning (SL) is believed to enable humans to assimilate a range of statistical structures, and thus plays a role in many cognitive functions. There is also a growing interest in how SL interacts with basic cognitive processes, including perception and attention. Here, we ask how the extent to which stimuli predict, and are predicted by, other elements in a continuous stream affects their perception (i.e., encoding and representation) and the attention they attract. In two experiments, participants were first exposed to a stream of structured pairs of visual shapes (e.g., AB and CD). Then, they completed a target detection task to test if stimulus detection speed is influenced by a target's predictability during exposure (indexing representation) or by whether the shape preceding the target reliably predicted elements in the input (indexing attention). In Experiment 1 (N = 86), Reaction Times (RTs) were faster for second elements from structured pairs (i.e., cued elements) than first elements (i.e., cue elements), even when they appeared in new configurations (e.g., AD and CB). However, in Experiment 2 (N = 89), which orthogonally manipulated the target and the preceding shape properties, RTs were influenced solely by whether the preceding element was a cue for other elements, but not by the target's predictability. Thus, in contrast to previous studies using the same paradigm, our results do not provide evidence for an effect of SL on representation. Instead, our findings highlight how attention is guided by knowledge of statistical regularities, pointing to SL as a system that helps minimize uncertainty in structured environments.
Second-Language Learning Facilitates Non-Adjacent Dependency Learning: Effects Moderated by Specific Language.
Lu HS, Mintz TH
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42126045 · Full text
Statistical learning allows language learners to implicitly track regularities in input. Prior studies have suggested that second language (L2) learning affects statistical learning, but the nature of this relationship r...
Statistical learning allows language learners to implicitly track regularities in input. Prior studies have suggested that second language (L2) learning affects statistical learning, but the nature of this relationship remains unclear. Does L2 learning broadly enhance sensitivity to statistical structure, selectively tune learners to patterns emphasized in the learned language, or both? We tested English-speaking adults enrolled in introductory Mandarin or Spanish courses, along with English monolingual controls, on two statistical learning tasks: a tonal word segmentation task and a non-adjacent dependency (NAD) learning task. Participants completed both tasks at the beginning of instruction and again after two academic terms. All groups performed above chance in the tonal task, but none showed significant improvement over time, including Mandarin learners. In contrast, only Spanish learners demonstrated increased sensitivity to NADs over time. These findings suggest that statistical learning is not uniformly boosted by L2 experience. Instead, L2 exposure may selectively tune learners' sensitivity to relational patterns that are emphasized in their linguistic experience. More broadly, the results highlight how the structure of linguistic experience can shape statistical learning mechanisms.
Entropy's Dilemma: Facilitatory and Inhibitory Effects of Information Entropy During Language Processing.
Karimi H, Zinn J, Li H
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42126014 · Publisher ↗
During language processing, context usually prompts predictions over multiple words, not a single word. We examined how the distribution of multiple plausible words following a context, that is, conditional entropy, infl...
During language processing, context usually prompts predictions over multiple words, not a single word. We examined how the distribution of multiple plausible words following a context, that is, conditional entropy, influences lexical processing. Greater conditional entropy simultaneously corresponds to activation of more semantic features, which should facilitate processing, and activation of more lexical competitors, which should inhibit processing. Participants (N = 58) completed two experimental sessions 14-21 days apart. In session 1, they produced up to eight completions for sentence fragments (N = 648), missing a final, target word (e.g., banana) along with probability values for each response. In session 2, they read the same sentences, including the target word, while their eye movements were tracked. We computed conditional entropy at the trial level (i.e., for each participant, for each sentence). To tease apart the semantic feature activation and lexical competition components of conditional entropy, we calculated total semantic overlap; the sum of semantic similarity values between target words and the responses produced during sentence completion (e.g., mango, orange, coconut, etc.). The remainder of conditional entropy would then capture lexical entropy corresponding to lexical competition. The results revealed that semantic overlap facilitated lexical processing, but lexical entropy inhibited it. A reanalysis of an independent self-paced reading dataset (N participants = 111, N items = 647) revealed the same pattern. These results suggest that conditional entropy should be decomposed to semantic activation and lexical competition, corresponding to facilitation and inhibition during language processing, respectively. Implications for predictive processing views of language processing and large language models are discussed.
"Just-Right" Is (Not) Always Right: Joint Effects of Typicality and Informativity During Real-Time Sentence Processing.
He M, Kaiser E
Cogn Sci · 2026 May · PMID 42126012 · Publisher ↗
A growing body of empirical research shows that, for both affirmative and negative sentences, language processing is not only shaped by the ease of integrating linguistic input into world knowledge, but also by expectati...
A growing body of empirical research shows that, for both affirmative and negative sentences, language processing is not only shaped by the ease of integrating linguistic input into world knowledge, but also by expectations of informative communication. Yet, it remains unclear how comprehenders coordinate pressures from both aspects during real-time sentence processing. We propose that language comprehension reflects a dynamic balance between world-knowledge typicality and communication informativeness, which is subject to contextual modulation. Two self-paced reading studies test this proposal by examining affirmative and negative sentences describing part-whole relations that vary in typicality and informativity in unmarked and unexpectedness-signaling contexts. Our results provide evidence for joint effects of typicality and informativity, with distinct patterns across sentence polarities and contexts.
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