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In real-world vision, people prioritise the most informative scene regions via eye-movements. According to the cognitive guidance theory of visual attention, viewers allocate visual attention to those parts of the scene that are expected to be the most informative. The expected information of a scene region is coded in the semantic distribution of that scene. Meaning maps have been proposed to capture the spatial distribution of local scene semantics in order to test cognitive guidance theories of attention. Notwithstanding the success of meaning maps, the reason for their success has been contested. This has led to at least two possible explanations for the success of meaning maps in predicting visual attention. On the one hand, meaning maps might measure scene semantics. On the other hand, meaning maps might measure scene features, overlapping with, but distinct from, scene semantics. This study aims to disentangle these two sources of information by considering both conceptual information and non-semantic scene entropy simultaneously. We found that both semantic and non-semantic information is captured by meaning maps, but scene entropy accounted for more unique variance in the success of meaning maps than conceptual information. Additionally, some explained variance was unaccounted for by either source of information. Thus, although meaning maps may index some aspect of semantic information, their success seems to be better explained by non-semantic information. We conclude that meaning maps may not yet be a good tool to test cognitive guidance theories of attention in general, since they capture non-semantic aspects of local semantic density and only a small portion of conceptual information. Rather, we suggest that researchers should better define the exact aspect of cognitive guidance theories they wish to test and then use the tool that best captures that desired semantic information. As it stands, the semantic information contained in meaning maps seems too ambiguous to draw strong conclusions about how and when semantic information guides visual attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charges of hypocrisy are usually thought to be to be damning. Yet when a hypocrisy charge is made, there often remains disagreement about whether or not its target really is a hypocrite. Why? Three pre-registered experiments (N = 2599) conceptualize and test the role of perceived comparability in evaluating hypocrisy. Calling someone a hypocrite typically entails invoking a comparison—one meant to highlight internal contradiction and cast moral character into question. Yet there is ambiguity about which sorts of comparisons are valid in the first place. We argue that disagreements about moral hypocrisy often boil down to disagreements about comparability. Although the comparability of two situations should not depend on whose behavior is being scrutinized, observers shift comparability judgments in line with social motives to criticize or defend. In short, we identify a cognitive factor that can help to explain why, for similar patterns of behavior, people see hypocrisy in their enemies but consistency in themselves and their allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common assertion is that, based around prominent character traits, first impressions are spontaneously extracted from faces. Specifically, mere exposure to a person is sufficient to trigger the involuntary extraction of core personality characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness, dominance, competence), an outcome that supports a range of significant judgments (e.g., hiring, investing, electing). But is this in fact the case? Noting ambiguities in the extant literature, here we used a repetition priming procedure to probe the extent to which impressions of dominance are extracted from faces absent the instruction to evaluate the stimuli in this way. Across five experiments in which either the character trait of interest was made increasingly obvious to participants (Expts. 1–3) or attention was explicitly directed toward the faces to generate low-level/high-level judgments (Expts. 4 & 5), no evidence for the spontaneous extraction of first impressions was observed. Instead, priming only emerged when judgments of dominance were an explicit requirement of the task at hand. Thus, at least using a priming methodology, the current findings contest the notion that first impressions are a mandatory product of person perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence on the time-course of conversational perspective taking is mixed. Some results suggest that listeners rapidly incorporate an interlocutor's knowledge during comprehension, while other findings suggest that listeners initially interpret language egocentrically. A key finding in support of the egocentric view comes from visual-world eye-tracking studies - listeners systematically look at potential referents that are known to them but unknown to the speaker. An alternative explanation is that eye movements might be driven by attentional processes that are unrelated to referent identification. To address this question, we assessed the time-course of perspective taking using event-related potentials (ERP). Participants were instructed to select a referent from a display of four animals (e.g., "Click on the brontosaurus with the boots") by a speaker who could only see three of the animals. A competitor (e.g., a brontosaurus with a purse) was either mutually visible, visible only to the listener, or absent from the display. Results showed that only the mutually visible competitor elicited an ERP signature of referential ambiguity. Critically, ERPs exhibited no evidence of referential confusion when the listener had privileged access to the competitor. Contra the egocentric hypothesis, this pattern of results indicates that listeners did not consider privileged competitors to be candidates for reference. These findings are consistent with theories of language processing that allow socio-pragmatic information to rapidly influence online language comprehension. The results also suggest that eye-tracking evidence in studies of online reference resolution may include distraction effects driven by privileged competitors and highlight the importance of using multiple measures to investigate perspective use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentences such as The bags are light allow both collective (they are light together) and distributive interpretations (each bag is light). We report the results of two experiments showing that this collective/distributive contrast gives rise to priming effects. These findings suggest that collective and distributive readings involve different interpretative mechanisms, which are at play during real comprehension and can be targeted by priming, independently of the specific verification strategy associated with each interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence is growing for the involvement of consolidation processes in the learning and retention of language, largely based on instances of new linguistic components (e.g., new words). Here, we assessed whether consolidation effects extend to the semantic processing of highly familiar words. The experiments were based on the word-meaning priming paradigm in which a homophone is encountered in a context that biases interpretation towards the subordinate meaning. The homophone is subsequently used in a word-association test to determine whether the priming encounter facilitates the retrieval of the primed meaning. In Experiment 1 (N = 74), we tested the resilience of priming over periods of 2 and 12 h that were spent awake or asleep, and found that sleep periods were associated with stronger subsequent priming effects. In Experiment 2 (N = 55) we tested whether the sleep benefit could be explained in terms of a lack of retroactive interference by testing participants 24 h after priming. Participants who had the priming encounter in the evening showed stronger priming effects after 24 h than participants primed in the morning, suggesting that sleep makes priming resistant to interference during the following day awake. The results suggest that consolidation effects can be found even for highly familiar linguistic materials. We interpret these findings in terms of a contextual binding account in which all language perception provides a learning opportunity, with sleep and consolidation contributing to the updating of our expectations, ready for the next day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity in language derives, in part, from the multiple motivations that underlie the choice to use any particular expression. The use of some lexical items, such as probability expressions and scalar terms, can be motivated by a desire to communicate uncertainty as well as a desire to be polite (i.e., manage face). Research has demonstrated that the interpretation of these items can be influenced by the existence of a potential politeness motive. In general, communications about negative events, relative to positive events, result in higher likelihood estimates whenever politeness can be discerned as a potential motive. With few exceptions, however, this research has focused only on the hearer. In the present research we focused on the dyad and examined whether speakers vary their messages as a function of politeness, and the effect that this has on subsequent judgments made by a recipient. In two experiments we presented participants with situations that varied in terms of face-threat and asked them how they would communicate potentially threatening information. Both experiments included a second set of participants who read these utterances and provided judgments as to the degree of uncertainty conveyed by the utterance. In both experiments, messages in the face-threatening condition conveyed greater uncertainty than messages in the non-face-threatening condition, and the probability estimates made by the second set of participants varied as a function of conveyed uncertainty. This research demonstrates that when examining speakers and hearers together, severe events may be judged less likely (rather than more likely), because speakers tend to hedge the certainty with which they communicate the information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a homonym (e.g., bark) is encountered in a sentential context that biases its interpretation towards a less frequent meaning, subsequent interpretations of the word are more likely to favour that subordinate meaning. Such word-meaning priming effects have been shown to be maintained via sleep-related consolidation, leading some to suggest that declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language comprehension, providing a relatively enduring contextually bound memory trace for the ambiguous word. By this account, word-meaning priming effects should be observable for all words, not just homonyms. In three experiments, participants were exposed to non-homonym targets (e.g., "balloon") in sentences that biased interpretation towards a specific aspect of the word's meaning (e.g., balloon‑helium vs. balloon-float). After a ~ 10-30 min delay, the targets were presented in relatedness judgement and associate production tasks to assess whether the sentential contexts enhanced access to the primed aspect of the word's meaning. The results reveal that word-meaning priming effects do extend to non-homonyms. Indeed, there was also some evidence of a more generalised priming that did not rely on prior presentation of the non-homonym itself. We argue that context-specific interpretations of words are maintained during recognition in order to facilitate comprehension over longer periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish word dedo can refer to a toe or a finger, that is, these two meanings colexify in Spanish; and they do so as well in over one hundred other languages. Previous work shows that related meanings are more likely to colexify. This is attributed to cognitive pressure towards simplicity in language, as it makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and the competing pressure for languages to support accurate information transfer. We hypothesize that colexification follows a Goldilocks principle that balances the two pressures: meanings are more likely to attach to the same word when they are related to an optimal degree-neither too much, nor too little. We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal forces shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human languages evolve to make communication more efficient. But efficiency creates trade-offs: what is efficient for speakers is not always efficient for comprehenders. How do languages balance these competing pressures? We focus on Zipf's meaning-frequency law, the observation that frequent wordforms have more meanings. On the one hand, this law could reflect a speaker-oriented pressure to reuse frequent wordforms. Yet human languages still maintain thousands of distinct wordforms, suggesting a countervailing, comprehender-oriented pressure. What balance of these pressures produces Zipf's meaning-frequency law? Using a neutral baseline, we find that frequent wordforms in real lexica have fewer homophones than predicted by their phonotactic structure: real lexica favor a comprehender-oriented pressure to reduce the cost of frequent disambiguation. These results help clarify the evolutionary drive for efficiency: human languages are subject to competing pressures for efficient communication, the relative magnitudes of which reveal how individual-level cognitive constraints shape languages over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilinguals demonstrate benefits on non-linguistic tasks requiring cognitive control-the regulation of mental activity to resolve information-conflict during processing. This "bilingual advantage" has been attributed to the consistent management of two languages, yet it remains unknown if these benefits extend to sentence processing. In monolinguals, cognitive control helps detect and revise misinterpretations of sentence meaning. Here, we test if the bilingual advantage extends to parsing and interpretation by comparing bilinguals' and monolinguals' syntactic ambiguity resolution before and after practicing N-back, a non-syntactic cognitive-control task. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on a high-conflict but not a no-conflict version of N-back and on sentence comprehension, indicating that the advantage extends to language interpretation. Gains on N-back conflict trials also predicted comprehension improvements for ambiguous sentences, suggesting that the bilingual advantage emerges across tasks tapping shared cognitive-control procedures. Because the overall task benefits were observed for conflict and non-conflict trials, bilinguals' advantage may reflect increased cognitive flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grillo and Costa (2014) claim that Relative-Clause attachment ambiguity resolution is largely dependent on whether or not a Pseudo-Relative interpretation is available. Data from Italian, and other languages allowing Pseudo-Relatives, support this hypothesis. Pseudo-Relative availability, however, covaries with the semantics of the main predicate (e.g., perceptual vs. stative). Experiment 1 assesses whether this predicate distinction alone can account for prior attachment results by testing it with a language that disallows Pseudo-Relatives (i.e. English). Low Attachment was found independent of Predicate-Type. Predicate-Type did however have a minor modulatory role. Experiment 2 shows that English, traditionally classified as a Low Attachment language, can demonstrate High Attachment with sentences globally ambiguous between a Small-Clause and a reduced Relative-Clause interpretation. These results support a grammatical account of previous effects and provide novel evidence for the parser’s preference of a Small-Clause over a Restrictive interpretation, crosslinguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We examined whether moral concerns shape awareness of ambiguous stimuli. [•] Participants saw moral and non-moral words in a lexical decision task. [•] Moral and non-moral words were matched on length, and frequency in lexicon. [•] Participants correctly identified moral words more frequently than non-moral words. [•] This experiments suggest that moral values may shape perceptual awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bayesian accounts of social cognition successfully model the human ability to infer goals and intentions of others on the basis of their behavior. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to the analysis of ambiguity resolution during brief communicative exchanges. In a reference game experimental setup, we observed that participants were able to infer listeners' preferences when analyzing their choice of object given referential ambiguity. Moreover, a subset of speakers was able to strategically choose ambiguous over unambiguous utterances in an epistemic manner, although a different group preferred unambiguous utterances. We show that a modified Rational Speech Act model well-approximates the data of both the inference of listeners' preferences and their utterance choices. In particular, the observed preference inference is modeled by Bayesian inference, which computes posteriors over hypothetical, behavior-influencing inner states of conversation partners-such as their knowledge, beliefs, intentions, or preferences-after observing their utterance-interpretation behavior. Utterance choice is modeled by anticipating social information gain, which we formalize as the expected knowledge change, when choosing a particular utterance and watching the listener's response. Taken together, our results demonstrate how social conversations allow us to (sometimes strategically) learn about each other when observing interpretations of ambiguous utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically engaging perceptual 'puzzles' known as Mooney images, and to report on the strength of their aha experience upon revealing the solution image (curiosity relief). We also asked our participants (279) to make a guess concerning the solution of the image, and used the distribution of these guesses to compute the crowdsourced semantic entropy (or ambiguity) of the images, as a measure of the potential for information gain. Our results confirm that curiosity and, even more so, aha experience is substantially associated with this semantic information gain measure. These findings support the expected information gain theory of curiosity and suggest that the aha experience or intrinsic reward is driven by the actual information gain. In an unannounced memory part, we also established that the often reported influence of curiosity on memory is fully mediated by the aha experience or curiosity relief. We discuss the implications of our results for the burgeoning fields of curiosity and psychoaesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human languages are replete with ambiguity. This is most evident in homophony--where two or more words sound the same, but carry distinct meanings. For example, the wordform "bark" can denote either the sound produced by a dog or the protective outer sheath of a tree trunk. Why would a system evolved for efficient, effective communication display rampant ambiguity? Some accounts argue that ambiguity is actually a design feature of human communication systems, allowing languages to recycle their most optimal wordforms (those which are short, frequent, and phonotactically well-formed) for multiple meanings. We test this claim by constructing five series of artificial lexica matched for the phonotactics and distribution of word lengths found in five real languages (English, German, Dutch, French, and Japanese), and comparing both the quantity and concentration of homophony across the real and artificial lexica. Surprisingly, we find that the artificial lexica exhibit higher upper-bounds on homophony than their real counterparts, and that homophony is even more likely to be found among short, phonotactically plausible wordforms in the artificial than in the real lexica. These results suggest that homophony in real languages is not directly selected for, but rather, that it emerges as a natural consequence of other features of a language. In fact, homophony may even be selected against in real languages, producing lexica that better conform to other requirements of humans who need to use them. Finally, we explore the hypothesis that this is achieved by "smoothing" out dense concentrations of homophones across lexical neighborhoods, resulting in comparatively more minimal pairs in real lexica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf's functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller's monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural morphology in English is associated with a multiplicity inference. For example, "Emily fed giraffes" is typically interpreted to mean that Emily fed multiple giraffes. It has long been observed that this inference disappears in downward-entailing linguistic environments, such as in the scope of negation. For example, "Emily didn't feed giraffes" does not merely suggest that she didn't feed multiple giraffes, but rather that she didn't feed any. There are three main approaches to explaining this puzzle: the first proposes that the plural is ambiguous, and invokes a preference for stronger meanings; the second derives multiplicity inferences as implicatures; and the third provides a homogeneity-based account. These different approaches can all account for the interpretation of the plural across upward- and downward-entailing environments. They differ, however, in what they predict for three further aspects of the plural: the status of positive and negative plural sentences in singular contexts, children's acquisition of plural meanings, and the relationship between plural meanings and scalar implicatures. In this paper, we report on three experiments investigating adults' and preschool-aged children's interpretation of plural morphology in English. The experiments reveal that participants distinguish positive and negative plural sentences presented in singular contexts, and that adults assign a different status to these positive and negative sentences. It is also observed that children, unlike adults, tend to accept underinformative positive plural sentences in singular contexts - in parallel with their behavior on standard scalar implicatures - while they are relatively more adult-like when it comes to negative plural sentences in the same contexts, showing a tendency to reject the negative sentences. We discuss how the findings of the three experiments are expected on a scalar implicature approach to multiplicity inferences, and the open challenges they pose for the ambiguity and homogeneity approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variable linguistic environments require the ability to quickly update expectations and behavior including speech comprehension. This adaptive capacity is key to understanding how listeners successfully recognize speaker intentions in light of the ubiquitous variability in speech. The present study investigates how listeners' real-time sentence comprehension adapts to speaker-specific prosodic variability. In two forced choice mouse tracking experiments, listeners had to identify a visual referent guided by pre-recorded instructions. When exposed to a speaker that uses unconventional pitch accent placement, listeners discard intonational information for that speaker, but keep using intonation to resolve the referential ambiguity for another speaker that places pitch accents conventionally. These results show for the first time that intonationally guided sentence comprehension adapts in a speaker-sensitive way. The study further provides valuable first insights into the temporal unfolding of this adaptation process. Listeners first attribute unconventional patterns to the context, thus discarding the informational value of intonation for both speakers. After sufficient evidence, however, listeners start attributing unexpected patterns to only the unconventional speaker. Materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: http://osf.io/fdpg4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]