A network of left frontal and temporal brain regions supports language processing. This "core" language network stores our knowledge of words and constructions as well as constraints on how those combine to form sentences. However, our linguistic knowledge additionally includes information about phonemes and how they combine to form phonemic clusters, syllables, and words.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe quantifier "some" often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: "Some of today's letters have checks inside" is often interpreted to mean that not all of today's letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on the speaker's knowledgeability: If the speaker has only examined some of the available letters (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent evidence suggests that language processing is well-adapted to noise in the input (e.g., spelling or speech errors, misreading or mishearing) and that comprehenders readily correct the input via rational inference over possible intended sentences given probable noise corruptions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. In this model, common knowledge of a noisy channel leads to the use and correct understanding of sentence fragments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne of the most puzzling and important facts about communication is that people do not always mean what they say; speakers often use imprecise, exaggerated, or otherwise literally false descriptions to communicate experiences and attitudes. Here, we focus on the nonliteral interpretation of number words, in particular hyperbole (interpreting unlikely numbers as exaggerated and conveying affect) and pragmatic halo (interpreting round numbers imprecisely). We provide a computational model of number interpretation as social inference regarding the communicative goal, meaning, and affective subtext of an utterance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe distribution of word orders across languages is highly nonuniform, with subject-verb-object (SVO) and subject-object-verb (SOV) orders being prevalent. Recent work suggests that the SOV order may be the default in human language. Why, then, is SVO order so common? We hypothesize that SOV/SVO variation can be explained by language users' sensitivity to the possibility of noise corrupting the linguistic signal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
May 2013
Sentence processing theories typically assume that the input to our language processing mechanisms is an error-free sequence of words. However, this assumption is an oversimplification because noise is present in typical language use (for instance, due to a noisy environment, producer errors, or perceiver errors). A complete theory of human sentence comprehension therefore needs to explain how humans understand language given imperfect input.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
September 2012
Inferring what speakers mean from what they say requires consideration of what they know. For instance, depending on the speaker's level of expertise, uttering Some squirrels hibernate can imply that not all squirrels hibernate, or it might imply the weaker proposition that the speaker does not know whether all squirrels hibernate. The present study examines the extent to which speaker knowledge influences implied meanings as well as the timing of any such influence.
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