Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation.

Can non-human animals combine abstract representations much like humans do with language? In particular, can they entertain a compositional representation such as 'not blue'? Across two experiments, we demonstrate that baboons (Papio papio) show a capacity for compositionality. Experiment 1 showed that baboons can entertain negative, compositional, representations: they can learn to associate a cue with iconically related referents (e.g.

Expressions with Aspectual Verbs Elicit Slower Reading Times than Those with Psychological Verbs: An Eye-Tracking Study in Mandarin Chinese.

Research over the last 20 years has investigated the processing costs for sentences such as John began the book. Much of this work has conflated sentences with aspectual verbs, like start or finish, with psychological verbs, like enjoy or tolerate. However, recent studies have reported greater costs for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs (e.

Constraints on the lexicons of human languages have cognitive roots present in baboons ().

Using a pattern extraction task, we show that baboons, like humans, have a learning bias that helps them discover connected patterns more easily than disconnected ones-i.e., they favor rules like "contains between 40% and 80% red" over rules like "contains around 30% red or 100% red.

Competition and Symmetry in an Artificial Word Learning Task.

Natural language involves competition. The sentences we choose to utter activate alternative sentences (those we chose not to utter), which hearers typically infer to be false. Hence, as a first approximation, the more alternatives a sentence activates, the more inferences it will trigger.