Interactive repair and the foundations of language.

The robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is deeply intertwined with two core properties of human language: reflexivity (it can communicate about itself) and accountability (it is used to publicly enforce social norms). We review empirical and theoretical advances from across the cognitive sciences that mark interactive repair as a domain of pragmatic universals, a key place to study metacognition in interaction, and a system that enables collective computation.

Scale in Language.

A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when "everything is connected." This paper offers a framework for tackling that challenge by identifying *scale* as a conceptual mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems.

Language Entails Linguistic Relativity.

This commentary addresses the challenge of linking an individual-grounded theory of concepts to a phenomenon that assumes conceptual conventions at population level (linguistic relativity). We distinguish I-concepts (individual, interior, imagistic) from L-concepts (linguistic, labeled, local) and see that quite different causal processes are often conflated under the term "concepts." I argue that the Grounded Cognition Model (GCM) entails linguistic relativity only to the extent that it imports L-concepts into its scope, which it can hardly avoid doing given that practitioners require language to coordinate around their theory and findings.

Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale.

Prosociality and cooperation are key to what makes us human. But different cultural norms can shape our evolved capacities for interaction, leading to differences in social relations. How people share resources has been found to vary across cultures, particularly when stakes are high and when interactions are anonymous.

Beyond Single-Mindedness: A Figure-Ground Reversal for the Cognitive Sciences.

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition.

Linguistic concepts are self-generating choice architectures.

While the idea of a 'concept' has been defined in diverse ways, researchers in the cognitive science of language have largely agreed that linguistic concepts are objects, whether mental or physical, that bits of language stand for. This O-axis view (where O = object), focusing on sign-object relations, sees linguistic concepts as ideas that stand in a static relation to signs, with the function of mediating relations between agents and their environments. But this is only half the story.

Enchrony.

What are the properties of mind that make language the way it is, and languages the way they are? To answer those questions, it is necessary to look at the causal processes by which languages become the way they are. The relevant dynamic processes take place in different causal frames, including the familiar diachronic, phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and microgenetic frames. One frame is less frequently acknowledged and yet is arguably central to cognitive-scientific explanations of language.

Misinformation: an empirical study with scientists and communicators during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives: To study the experiences and views within the health science community regarding the spread and prevention of science misinformation within and beyond the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: An exploratory study with an empirical ethics approach using qualitative interviews with Australians who produce, communicate and study health science research.

Results: Key elements that participants considered might facilitate misinformation included: the production of low-quality, fraudulent or biased science research; inadequate public access to high-quality research; insufficient public reading of high-quality research.

Differential coding of perception in the world's languages.

Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.

Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude.

Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects-social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying 'thank you' as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents.

Marked Initial Pitch in Questions Signals Marked Communicative Function.

In conversation, the initial pitch of an utterance can provide an early phonetic cue of the communicative function, the speech act, or the social action being implemented. We conducted quantitative acoustic measurements and statistical analyses of pitch in over 10,000 utterances, including 2512 questions, their responses, and about 5000 other utterances by 180 total speakers from a corpus of 70 natural conversations in 10 languages. We measured pitch at first prominence in a speaker's utterance and discriminated utterances by language, speaker, gender, question form, and what social action is achieved by the speaker's turn.

Suspending the next turn as a form of repair initiation: evidence from Argentine Sign Language.

Practices of other-initiated repair deal with problems of hearing or understanding what another person has said in the fast-moving turn-by-turn flow of conversation. As such, other-initiated repair plays a fundamental role in the maintenance of intersubjectivity in social interaction. This study finds and analyses a special type of other-initiated repair that is used in turn-by-turn conversation in a sign language: Argentine Sign Language (Lengua de Señas Argentina or LSA).

Is "huh?" a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items.

A word like Huh?--used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said--is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance.

Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation.

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures.