Patterns of language use change over time and may reflect and/or impact lexico-semantic representations of individuals as they age. In the current study, we use distributional semantic word embeddings trained on corpora from different decades (HistWords) to examine language change. We first measured lexico-semantic organization in different age groups, using an open dataset of association norms, and tested how they may be related to language change. Then, using the diachronic word embeddings, we sampled English words that have changed in meaning and words that have maintained the same meaning/usage patterns between the 1950s and the 1990s. We tested how relatedness judgments for those words differ when paired with their “neighbors” from earlier vs. recent decades, for both younger and older adults. Our findings suggest that individuals continuously and rapidly update their lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan, such that earlier learned meanings have minimal impact on present-day representation.

Prediction is often regarded as an integral aspect of incremental language comprehension, but little is known about the cognitive architectures and mechanisms that support it. We review studies showing that listeners and readers use all manner of contextual information to generate multifaceted predictions about upcoming input. The nature of these predictions may vary between individuals owing to differences in language experience, among other factors. We then turn to unresolved questions which may guide the search for the underlying mechanisms. (i) Is prediction essential to language processing or an optional strategy? (ii) Are predictions generated from within the language system or by domain-general processes? (iii) What is the relationship between prediction and memory? (iv) Does prediction in comprehension require simulation via the production system? We discuss promising directions for making progress in answering these questions and for developing a mechanistic understanding of prediction in language.

Seven experiments use large sample sizes to robustly estimate the effect size of a previous finding that adults are more likely to commit egocentric errors in a false-belief task when the egocentric response is plausible in light of their prior knowledge. We estimate the true effect size to be less than half of that reported in the original findings. Even though we found effects in the same direction as the original, they were substantively smaller; the original study would have had less than 33% power to detect an effect of this magnitude. The influence of plausibility on the curse of knowledge in adults appears to be small enough that its impact on real-life perspective-taking may need to be reevaluated.

Background: Speech of individuals with non-fluent, including Broca’s, aphasia is often characterized as “agrammatic” because their output mostly consists of nouns and, to a lesser extent, verbs and lacks function words, like articles and prepositions, and correct morphological endings. Among the earliest accounts of agrammatic output in the early 1900s was the “economy of effort” idea whereby agrammatic output is construed as a way of coping with increases in the cost of language production. This idea resurfaced in the 1980s, but in general, the field of language research has largely focused on accounts of agrammatism that postulated core deficits in syntactic knowledge. Aims: We here revisit the economy of effort hypothesis in light of increasing emphasis in cognitive science on rational and efficient behavior. Main contribution: The critical idea is as follows: there is a cost per unit of linguistic output, and this cost is greater for patients with non-fluent aphasia. For a rational agent, this increase leads to shorter messages. Critically, the informative parts of the message should be preserved and the redundant ones (like the function words and inflectional markers) should be omitted. Although economy of effort is unlikely to provide a unifying account of agrammatic output in all patients—the relevant population is too heterogeneous and the empirical landscape too complex for any single-factor explanation—we argue that the idea of agrammatic output as a rational behavior was dismissed prematurely and appears to provide a plausible explanation for a large subset of the reported cases of expressive aphasia. Conclusions: The rational account of expressive agrammatism should be evaluated more carefully and systematically. On the basic research side, pursuing this hypothesis may reveal how the human mind and brain optimize communicative efficiency in the presence of production difficulties. And on the applied side, this construal of expressive agrammatism emphasizes the strengths of some patients to flexibly adapt utterances in order to communicate in spite of grammatical difficulties; and focusing on these strengths may be more effective than trying to “fix” their grammar.

According to cross-situational learning, infants aggregate statistical information across naming events to resolve ambiguous word-referent mappings. While lab experiments show that learners are sensitive to these statistics, in studies using naturalistic stimuli, adults often fail to infer the correct referent. Here, we examined how young learners' input “in the wild” differs from laboratory experiments. We analyzed the temporal and spatial regularities of parent naming events in a naturalistic dataset of parent-child play and tested their effect on infants' visual attention. Parents were less likely to name the same toy twice than to name two different toys in sequence, except at short lags (0>t>5s). Most of the visual scenes accompanying naming events were composed of several toys of approximately equal (small) size. Child-attention to the target toy appeared to be modulated primarily by size. These results underscore the importance of quantifying naturalistic statistical regularities for understanding the mechanisms of word learning.

In successful communication, speakers tailor their language tothe context and listeners make inferences about the speaker’sknowledge. Several current accounts propose that both speak-ers and listeners accomplish this by rational analysis of thestatistics in the environment, including their partner. Here weexamine perspective-taking behaviour in a dyadic conversationtask, where the same individuals act in the role of both speakerand listener. We model perspective-taking in both productionand comprehension, taking into account the dyadic situation.Our findings suggest that conversational partners weight theirown perspective more than the partner’s when speaking, andthe partner’s perspective more than their own when listening.We also find that in both production and comprehension, con-versational partners change the weighting of perspectives overtime, moving towards relying more on the partner’s perspec-tive at the expense of their own perspective. Surprisingly, wefind little evidence that listeners or speakers adapt to the id-iosyncratic statistics of their partner’s linguistic behaviour.

Recent work suggests that language understanding is the result of rational inference over a noisy channel. Uponperceiving a sentence, listeners decode the speaker’s intended sentence from the prior probability that a speaker would say thatsentence and the probability that it would be corrupted to the perceived sentence by noise. Here we examine the listener’snoise model. Readers were asked to correct sentences if they thought they contained an error. We manipulated context suchthat participants corrected exposure sentences containing either deletion, insertion, swap, mixed, or no errors (e.g., swap: Abystander was rescued by the fireman in the time of nick.). Test sentences were syntactically licensed but implausible (e.g., Thebat swung the player). On test sentences, participants’ corrections differed by exposure condition. This suggests participantstrack the type of errors that have a higher likelihood and make inferences about the intentions of the speaker accordingly.

Spoken language production involves selecting and assembling words and syntactic structures to convey one's message. Here we probe this process by analyzing natural language productions of individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and healthy individuals. Based on prior neuropsychological observations, we hypothesize that patients who have difficulty producing complex syntax might choose semantically richer words to make their meaning clear, whereas patients with lexicosemantic deficits may choose more complex syntax. To evaluate this hypothesis, we first introduce a frequency-based method for characterizing the syntactic complexity of naturally produced utterances. We then show that lexical and syntactic complexity, as measured by their frequencies, are negatively correlated in a large (n = 79) PPA population. We then show that this syntax-lexicon trade-off is also present in the utterances of healthy speakers (n = 99) taking part in a picture description task, suggesting that it may be a general property of the process by which humans turn thoughts into speech.

In everyday communication, speakers make errors and produce language in a noisy environment. Recent work suggests that comprehenders possess cognitive mechanisms for dealing with noise in the linguistic signal: a noisy-channel model. A key parameter of these models is the noise model: the comprehender's implicit model of how noise affects utterances before they are perceived. Here we examine this noise model in detail, asking whether comprehension behavior reflects a noise model that is adapted to context. We asked readers to correct sentences if they noticed errors, and manipulated context by including exposure sentences containing obvious deletions (A bystander was rescued by the fireman in the nick time.), insertions, exchanges, mixed errors, or no errors. On test sentences (The bat swung the player.), participants' corrections differed depending on the exposure condition. The results demonstrate that participants model specific types of errors and make inferences about the intentions of the speaker accordingly.

In everyday communication, speakers and listeners make sophisticated inferences about their conversation partner's intended meaning. They combine their knowledge of the visuospatial context with reasoning about the other person's knowledge state and rely on shared assumptions about how language is used to express communicative intentions. However, these assumptions may differ between languages of nonindustrialized-where conversations often primarily take place within a, so-called, society of intimates-and industrialized cultures-societies of strangers. Here, we study inference in communication in the Tsimane', an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, who have little contact with industrialization or formal education. Using a referential communication task, we probe how Tsimane' speakers refer to objects in the world around them when there are potential ambiguities (e.g., referring to a cup when there are multiple cups in view) across different visual contexts. Using an eye-tracking task, we probe the real-time inferences that Tsimane' listeners make about the speaker's intentions. We find that Tsimane' speakers use visual (color, size) contrasts to disambiguate referents (e.g., "Hand me the small cup"), much like English speakers, and they predictively direct their gaze to objects in a contrast set when they hear a modifier (e.g., "small"). Despite myriad cultural and linguistic dissimilarities between the two populations, the qualitative patterns of behavior and eye-gaze of Tsimane' and English speakers were strikingly similar, suggesting that the communicative expectations underlying many everyday inferences may be shared across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).