Abstract We investigate partner effects on spatial perspective taking behavior in listeners, comparing behavior with a human versus a computer partner (Experiments 1 and 2), and with computer partners of different perceived capabilities (Experiment 3). Participants responded to spoken instructions from their partner which could be interpreted egocentrically (from their own perspective) or othercentrically (from […]

Abstract Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different […]

Abstract Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, […]