Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Realistic About Reference Production: Testing the Effects of Domain Size and Saturation

Abstract Experiments on visually grounded, definite reference production often manipulate simple visual scenes in the form of grids filled with objects, for example, to test how speakers are affected by the number of objects that are visible. Regarding the latter, it was found that speech onset times increase along with domain size, at least when […]

Published on June 25, 2024

Aspectual Processing Shifts Visual Event Apprehension

Abstract What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., “Ebony folded a napkin in 10 […]

Published on June 25, 2024

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Abstract There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies […]

Published on June 19, 2024