Review
Agronomy
Johanna Wilkes
Summary: This review explores how good governance can reconnect people with nature and advocates for transformation through governance at different scales to achieve more equitable and sustainable outcomes.
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Yinan Yu, Samuel Scheidegger, Jasmine Elliott, Asa Lofgren
Summary: This paper applies computational linguistics learning methods to the banking industry and climate change fields. It introduces a data-driven framework, climateBUG, that aims to detect latent information about how banks discuss their activities related to climate change using natural language processing (NLP).
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS
(2024)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Tessa E. S. Charlesworth, Aylin Caliskan, Mahzarin R. Banaji
Summary: This study analyzes the historical change and stability of social group representations using word embeddings from 850 billion words in English-language Google Books. The results show that while the top-associated words and traits changed over time, the average valence of these stereotypes remained generally persistent.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Marta Ghio, Cristina Cara, Marco Tettamanti
Summary: Despite evidence suggesting foetal ability to process and respond to sounds and speech stimuli, understanding the prenatal brain maturation of language responsiveness remains limited. Recent advances in foetal neuroimaging have provided a detailed understanding of the anatomical and functional development of auditory and language-related networks. This research highlights the importance of studying the prenatal readiness for speech processing in predicting postnatal language acquisition abilities and disabilities.
NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS
(2021)
Article
Linguistics
Daoxin Li, Kathryn D. Schuler
Summary: Languages vary in terms of the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. The distributional learning proposal suggests that the recursion of a structure is allowed if the positions in the structure are productively substitutable in non-recursive input. A study conducted an artificial language learning experiment to test this proposal and found that participants from a productive condition were more likely to accept unattested strings at both one- and two-embedding levels than participants from an unproductive condition.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Information Systems
Dalin Li, Yijin Wang, Guansu Wang, Jiadong Lu, Yong Zhu, Gabor Bella, Yanchun Liang
Summary: Brand identity (BI) refers to the characteristics of an enterprise or brand in the market and public perception. Successful BI management can bring great business value. This study applies knowledge graph (KG) and never-ending learning (NEL) to explore efficient Chinese BI management methods, improving accuracy and effectiveness.
Article
Linguistics
Stephan C. Meylan, Elika Bergelson
Summary: This article presents a framework of learning through processing for children's language acquisition and relates it to the methods used to assess their early knowledge of words. It proposes a testable timeline of qualitative changes in the learning process and discusses challenges and avenues for building a comprehensive theory of early word learning.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF LINGUISTICS
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Isabelle Chou, Jiehui Hu, Edinson Munoz, Adolfo M. Garcia
Summary: Research on bilingualism shows that the age at which a second language is acquired can affect the ability to recall information from naturalistic discourse. Early bilinguals outperformed late bilinguals in recalling information from real-life news reports, regardless of factors like attention speed and speech rate.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Shaohua Fang, Yi Xu
Summary: This study investigated the processing and acquisition of Chinese temporality by English-speaking learners. It found that there is a prototype effect in aspectual development, where different types of verbs have different processing and comprehension patterns. It also found that L2 proficiency and working memory capacity modulate these processes.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Natalia Cherepovskaia, Elizaveta Reutova, Natalia Slioussar
Summary: The study focused on differences in sentence processing between native and second language readers, finding that L2 readers exhibit non-native-like patterns at the beginner level but native-like patterns at the intermediate level when processing specific errors in Russian. This suggests that intermediate L2 readers may be using the same underlying mechanisms as in native language processing.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Melis Cetincelik, Caroline F. Rowland, Tineke M. Snijders
Summary: Eye gaze plays a significant role in infants' language learning, enhancing their understanding of objects and word-object mappings. There is evidence supporting longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later vocabulary development. However, further research is needed to determine if gaze effects are specific to certain tasks and to compare the effects of eye gaze cues with non-social attentional cues.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Blanka Klimova, Marcel Pikhart, Szymon Dziuba, Anna Cierniak-Emerych
Summary: Learning a foreign language may contribute to the subjective well-being of older individuals, maintaining it at a relatively high level. Factor analysis revealed the correlation between foreign language learning and seniors' subjective well-being.
Article
Linguistics
Bowen Wang-Kildegaard, Feng Ji
Summary: In addition to direct inference of word meanings, associating words with diverse contexts can be a key mechanism for vocabulary learning through reading. Researchers developed a text modification method called reflash, which allows learners to jump to a target word's previous or subsequent occurrences in digital books to synthesize clues across contexts. Experimental results showed that reflash-only words made more gains compared to other conditions on both learning outcomes.
APPLIED LINGUISTICS
(2023)
Article
Education & Educational Research
Alessandro Benati
Summary: This paper emphasizes the strong connection between the need for innovation in second language pedagogy and the understanding of how language develops in our minds/brains. Language teachers need to develop a working definition of language, communication, and a good knowledge of language acquisition. There is a need for teachers and researchers to reconnect with second language acquisition theories in both teaching and research to ensure evidence-based decisions in language pedagogy. The main challenge is how to make this knowledge common in language teaching.
IRANIAN JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
David M. Gomez, Carolina Holtheuer, Karen Miller, Cristina Schmitt
Summary: The study using eye tracking found that even 5- to 7.5-year-old children in Chilean Spanish cannot determine whether the subject refers to a plurality or a singleton set based on the morphology of the verb alone, requiring information from the noun phrase determiner to make a decision. This supports the hypothesis that number morphology is not always mapped into syntactic and semantic features by younger children in varieties of Spanish where number is subject to variation.
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Louisa Bogaerts, Noam Siegelman, Morten H. Christiansen, Ram Frost
Summary: Research on individual differences in learning statistical structure suggests the existence of variability in cognitive abilities, but the hypothesis of a general statistical learning capacity that can classify individuals as 'good' or 'bad' learners lacks strong evidence. An alternative perspective focusing on the variability of statistical environments within different cognitive domains has been proposed, leading to a different outlook on statistical learning research when considering learning tuned to real-world sensory inputs.
TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Morten H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens, Fabio Trecca
Summary: This article emphasizes the importance of conducting systematic comparisons between different languages in order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms and processes involved in children's acquisition of their native language, offering new insights.
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Erin S. Isbilen, Rebecca L. A. Frost, Padraic Monaghan, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: This article investigates how individuals learn and generalize complex regularities in the environment, and shows how language learning and generalization are embedded in broader cognitive theories. The results suggest that participants are able to chunk nonadjacent dependencies and rapidly generalize this information to novel structures.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Pablo Contreras Kallens, Rick Dale, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: This article emphasizes the need for a renewed understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration and introduces an information-theoretic measure to assess interdisciplinary work. The results suggest that cognitive science journals exhibit more mixed expertise compared to journals focusing on specific topics. The article argues that the perception of diminishing interdisciplinarity may be attributed to the emergence of different theoretical perspectives.
TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Morten H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens, Fabio Trecca
Summary: The study by Kidd and Garcia is long overdue as it highlights the lack of typological diversity in studies of language acquisition and emphasizes the urgency of more research on understudied languages. It argues for a systematic comparative approach to language acquisition, which can still benefit from investigations of well-studied languages.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Erin S. Isbilen, Stewart M. McCauley, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: Statistical learning is considered a cornerstone of cognition, but its relationship with natural language remains inconclusive. This study explored the link between statistical learning and language acquisition, finding a positive correlation between the ability to learn artificial language and sensitivity to certain structures in natural language.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Erin S. Isbilen, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: Statistical learning is crucial in language acquisition, but its consistency across different language properties is unclear. Infants show robust learning across stimuli, while adults have larger learning effects when multiple cues are present. However, significant publication bias and methodological factors affect the research outcomes.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Christina Dideriksen, Morten H. Christiansen, Kristian Tylen, Mark Dingemanse, Riccardo Fusaroli
Summary: Humans effortlessly engage in conversation and decision-making, but the study of the conversational devices that facilitate mutual understanding is limited. This research presents a comprehensive conceptual framework for investigating conversational devices and their adaptation to contextual demands. Two corpus studies were conducted to examine three conversational devices - backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment – and found that they adaptively adjust to the need for precision in different types of conversations. Task-oriented conversations displayed higher complementarity and less frequent but richer lexical and syntactic entrainment. The use of these conversational devices was observed to be potentially adaptive, as interlocutors who exhibited stronger linguistic complementarity performed better in tasks.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Educational
Christopher Cox, Christina Dideriksen, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Andreas Roepstorff, Morten H. H. Christiansen, Riccardo Fusaroli
Summary: This study compares the acoustic properties of Danish caregivers' spontaneous speech to infants (IDS) and adults (ADS). The results show that Danish IDS conforms to cross-linguistic prosodic patterns, with higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and slower articulation rate than ADS. However, vocalic properties of Danish IDS, including reduced vowel space, higher within-vowel variability, raised formants, and lower vowel discriminability, differ from ADS. These findings suggest the need for future research to compare languages with different phonological systems.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Pablo Contreras Kallens, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: To what extent can language be acquired solely from linguistic input? This question has puzzled scholars for thousands of years and remains a major topic of debate in cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hindered progress in studying it, especially in computational modeling, which has only been able to address small portions of our linguistic abilities. However, with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are deep learning architectures trained on vast amounts of natural language data, there are now computational tools that can be utilized to empirically determine the extent to which human language abilities can be acquired from linguistic experience. Despite their semantic and pragmatic limitations, LLMs have already demonstrated that grammatically complex language similar to human language can be acquired without the need for an innate grammar. Therefore, while there is still much to explore in how humans acquire and use language, LLMs provide comprehensive computational models for cognitive scientists to empirically evaluate the power of statistical learning in explaining the full complexity of human language.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
James P. P. Trujillo, Christina Dideriksen, Kristian Tylen, Morten H. H. Christiansen, Riccardo Fusaroli
Summary: This study analyzes data from two language corpora and assesses the coordination between language and motion. It found that low-level linguistic (lexical) entrainment is positively associated with motion entrainment, while high-level linguistic (semantic) entrainment is negatively associated with motion entrainment. This suggests a dynamic coordination of similarity and complementarity between language and motion in conversation.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Mads Kock Pedersen, Carlos Mauricio Castano Diaz, Qian Janice Wang, Mario Alejandro Alba-Marrugo, Ali Amidi, Rajiv V. Basaiawmoit, Carsten Bergenholtz, Morten H. Christiansen, Miroslav Gajdacz, Ralph Hertwig, Byurakn Ishkhanyan, Kim Klyver, Nicolai Ladegaard, Kim Mathiasen, Christine Parsons, Janet Rafner, Anders R. Villadsen, Mikkel Wallentin, Blanka Zana, Jacob F. Sherson
Summary: Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping has the potential to revolutionize personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. A game-based tool called Skill Lab was developed to assess cognitive abilities while providing an engaging narrative. Using a citizen science platform, a comprehensive validation was conducted, and reliable models were constructed to predict eight cognitive abilities based on in-game behavior. The results demonstrate the feasibility of rapid in-the-wild assessment of cognitive abilities and its potential for population-scale benchmarking and individualized mental health diagnostics.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Christina Dideriksen, Morten H. Christiansen, Mark Dingemanse, Malte Hojmark-Bertelsen, Christer Johansson, Kristian Tylen, Riccardo Fusaroli
Summary: Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. This study compares Danish and Norwegian, two matched languages differing primarily in their sound structure, to explore whether cross-linguistic differences influence the use of conversational devices. The findings suggest that linguistic differences may lead to systematic changes in language processing and use, and pave the way for further cross-linguistic investigations.
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Pablo Contreras Kallens, Morten H. Christiansen
Summary: Traditional accounts of language, based on the words-and-rules framework, have proven to be useful in natural language processing and cognitive science, but they also have important shortcomings. This article reviews evidence from language acquisition, sentence processing, and computational modeling to show the central role that multiword expressions play in language organization. These expressions straddle the line between lexicon and grammar, questioning the usefulness of this distinction as a foundation for our understanding of language. The article also reviews diverse approaches to account for the role of multiword expressions in language representation, acquisition, and processing.
FRONTIERS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
(2022)
Article
Linguistics
Carlos Gomez-Rodriguez, Morten H. Christiansen, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
Summary: The ability to generate and understand various sentences is a key feature of human language. Linguists have tried to define this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe syntactic dependencies. However, by sampling sentences from possible syntactic structures, it has been found that memory limitations have affected grammatical descriptions.
