Good-enough language production

Predictability and Variation in Language Are Differentially Affected by Learning and Production

General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory-the component of short-term memory used for temporary storage and manipulation of information. In this study, we consider the relationship between working memory and regularization of linguistic variation. Regularization is a well-documented process whereby languages become less variable (on some dimension) over time. This process has been argued to be driven by the behavior of individual language users, but the specific mechanism is not agreed upon. Here, we use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether limitations in working memory during either language learning or language production drive regularization behavior. We find that taxing working memory during production results in the loss of all types of variation, but the process by which random variation becomes more predictable is better explained by learning biases. A computational model offers a potential explanation for the production effect using a simple self-priming mechanism.

Word meaning is complex: Language-related generalization differences in autistic adults

The current study marries two important observations. First, there is a growing recognition that word meanings need to be flexibly extended in new ways as new contexts arise. Second, as evidenced primarily within the perceptual domain, autistic individuals tend to find generalization more challenging while showing stronger veridical memory in comparison to their neurotypical peers. Here we report that a group of 80 autistic adults finds it more challenging to flexibly extend the meanings of familiar words in new ways than a group of 80 neurotypical peers, while the autistic individuals outperform the neurotypicals on a novel word-learning task that does not require flexible extension. Results indicate that recognized differences in generalization present an ongoing challenge for autistic adults in the domain of language, separate from social cognition, executive function, or the ability to assign single fixed meanings to new words.

Conversational production and comprehension: fMRI-evidence reminiscent of but deviant from the classical Broca-Wernicke model

A key question in research on the neurobiology of language is to which extent the language production and comprehension systems share neural infrastructure, but this question has not been addressed in the context of conversation. We utilized a public fMRI dataset where 24 participants engaged in unscripted conversations with a confederate outside the scanner, via an audio-video link. We provide evidence indicating that the two systems share neural infrastructure in the left-lateralized perisylvian language network, but diverge regarding the level of activation in regions within the network. Activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus was stronger in production compared to comprehension, while comprehension showed stronger recruitment of the left anterior middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, compared to production. Although our results are reminiscent of the classical Broca-Wernicke model, the anterior (rather than posterior) temporal activation is a notable difference from that model. This is one of the findings that may be a consequence of the conversational setting, another being that conversational production activated what we interpret as higher-level socio-pragmatic processes. In conclusion, we present evidence for partial overlap and functional asymmetry of the neural infrastructure of production and comprehension, in the above-mentioned frontal vs temporal regions during conversation.

Good enough processing: what have we learned in the 20 years since Ferreira et al. (2002)?

Traditionally, language processing has been thought of in terms of complete processing of the input. In contrast to this, Ferreira and colleagues put forth the idea of good enough processing. The proposal was that during everyday processing, ambiguities remain unresolved, we rely on heuristics instead of full analyses, and we carry out deep processing only if we need to for the task at hand. This idea has gathered substantial traction since its conception. In the current work, I review the papers that have tested the three key claims of good enough processing: ambiguities remain unresolved and underspecified, we use heuristics to parse sentences, and deep processing is only carried out if required by the task. I find mixed evidence for these claims and conclude with an appeal to further refinement of the claims and predictions of the theory.

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. This provides novel insights into the role of repair in comparative cognition, language development, and human-computer interaction. As an always-available fallback option and an infrastructure for negotiating social commitments, interactive repair is foundational to the resilience, complexity, and flexibility of human language.

An Information-Theoretic Account of Availability Effects in Language Production

I present a computational-level model of language production in terms of a combination of information theory and control theory in which words are chosen incrementally in order to maximize communicative value subject to an information-theoretic capacity constraint. The theory generally predicts a tradeoff between ease of production and communicative accuracy. I apply the theory to two cases of apparent availability effects in language production, in which words are selected on the basis of their accessibility to a speaker who has not yet perfectly planned the rest of the utterance. Using corpus data on English relative clause complementizer dropping and experimental data on Mandarin noun classifier choice, I show that the theory reproduces the observed phenomena, providing an alternative account to Uniform Information Density and a promising general model of language production which is tightly linked to emerging theories in computational neuroscience.

Toward a Behavioral Interpretation of English Grammar

Behavior analysis is virtually alone among disciplines in assuming that the orderly arrangement of words in sentences, or grammar, arises from exposure to contingencies of reinforcement. In the face of the novelty, subtlety, complexity, and speed of acquisition of verbal behavior, this position will remain difficult to defend until the field can show that a representative range of grammatical phenomena is within reach of its interpretive tools. Using modern English as a case in point, this article points to the important role of automatic reinforcement in language acquisition and suggests that Skinner's concept of autoclitic frames (e.g., X is taller than Y) is central to a behavioral interpretation of grammatical phenomena. An enduring puzzle facing this interpretation is how stimulus control can shift from word to word in such frames as one speaks, for such permutations of verbal forms are often novel and rapidly emitted. A possible solution to the puzzle is offered by a consideration of contextual cues, prosodic cues, and the stimulus properties of the roles played by the content words that complete the frames. That these roles have discriminable stimulus properties is supported by considering that in Old English such roles directly controlled case inflections that correspond to positions in autoclitic frames. Continuing to develop behavioral interpretations of grammar is an important pursuit in its own right, whether or not it is sufficient to build bridges to other paradigms.

Syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances in Mandarin: Evidence from structural priming

Theories of how people interpret utterances with verb-related anomalies are chiefly based on English, but relatively little is known about the syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances in Mandarin, which has strikingly different typological features. In the current study, two experiments in structural priming paradigm were carried out to investigate whether native Mandarin speakers reconstructed a full syntactic form of missing-verb anomalous utterances. Our study shows that the magnitude of priming following a missing-verb anomalous sentence is equivalent to that following an error-free sentence, indicating that native Mandarin speakers reconstruct a full syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances. The results thus provide robust evidence for the syntactic reconstruction account.

Information-theoretic principles in incremental language production

I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate-distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in human language production, which is grounded in information theory and control theory. Language production is cast as the sequential selection of actions to achieve a communicative goal subject to a capacity constraint on cognitive control. In a series of calculations, simulations, corpus analyses, and comparisons to experimental data, I show that the model directly predicts some of the major known qualitative and quantitative phenomena in language production, including semantic interference and predictability effects in word choice; accessibility-based ("easy-first") production preferences in word order alternations; and the existence and distribution of disfluencies including filled pauses, corrections, and false starts. I connect the rate-distortion view to existing models of human language production, to probabilistic models of semantics and pragmatics, and to proposals for controlled language generation in the machine learning and reinforcement learning literature.

A reconceptualization of sentence production in post-stroke agrammatic aphasia: the synergistic processing bottleneck model

The language production deficit in post-stroke agrammatic aphasia (PSA-G) tends to result from lesions to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and is characterized by a triad of symptoms: fragmented sentences, errors in functional morphology, and a dearth of verbs. Despite decades of research, the mechanisms underlying production patterns in PSA-G have been difficult to characterize. Two major impediments to progress may have been the view that it is a purely morphosyntactic disorder and the (sometimes overzealous) application of linguistic theory without interceding psycholinguistic evidence. In this paper, empirical evidence is examined to present an integrated portrait of language production in PSA-G and to evaluate the assumption of a syntax-specific syndrome. In light of extant evidence, it is proposed that agrammatic language production results from a combination of morphosyntactic, phonomotor, and processing capacity limitations that cause a cumulative processing bottleneck at the point of articulatory planning. This proposed Synergistic Processing Bottleneck model of PSA-G presents a testable framework for future research. The paper ends with recommendations for future research on PSA-G.

Precision fMRI reveals that the language-selective network supports both phrase-structure building and lexical access during language production

A fronto-temporal brain network has long been implicated in language comprehension. However, this network's role in language production remains debated. In particular, it remains unclear whether all or only some language regions contribute to production, and which aspects of production these regions support. Across 3 functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments that rely on robust individual-subject analyses, we characterize the language network's response to high-level production demands. We report 3 novel results. First, sentence production, spoken or typed, elicits a strong response throughout the language network. Second, the language network responds to both phrase-structure building and lexical access demands, although the response to phrase-structure building is stronger and more spatially extensive, present in every language region. Finally, contra some proposals, we find no evidence of brain regions-within or outside the language network-that selectively support phrase-structure building in production relative to comprehension. Instead, all language regions respond more strongly during production than comprehension, suggesting that production incurs a greater cost for the language network. Together, these results align with the idea that language comprehension and production draw on the same knowledge representations, which are stored in a distributed manner within the language-selective network and are used to both interpret and generate linguistic utterances.

A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions

The "depth-charge" sentence, No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, is often interpreted as "no matter how trivial head injuries are, we should not ignore them" while the literal meaning is the opposite - "we should ignore them". Four decades of research have failed to resolve the source of this entrenched semantic illusion. Here we adopt the noisy-channel framework for language comprehension to provide a potential explanation. We hypothesize that depth-charge sentences result from inferences whereby comprehenders derive the interpretation by weighing the plausibility of possible readings of the depth-charge sentences against the likelihood of plausible sentences being produced with errors. In four experiments, we find that (1) the more plausible the intended meaning of the depth-charge sentence is, the more likely the sentence is to be misinterpreted; and (2) the higher the likelihood of our hypothesized noise operations, the more likely depth-charge sentences are to be misinterpreted. These results suggest that misinterpretation is affected by both world knowledge and the distance between the depth-charge sentence and a plausible alternative, which is consistent with the noisy-channel framework.

A chimpanzee by any other name: The contributions of utterance context and information density on word choice

An important feature of language production is the flexibility of lexical selection; producers could refer to an animal as chimpanzee, chimp, ape, she, and so on. Thus, a key question for psycholinguistic research is how and why producers make the lexical selections that they do. Information theoretic approaches have argued that producers regulate the uncertainty of the utterance for comprehenders, for example using longer words like chimpanzee if their messages are likely to be misunderstood, and shorter ones like chimp when the message is easy to understand. In this work, we test for the relative contributions of the information theoretic approach and an approach more aligned with psycholinguistic models of language production. We examine the effect on lexical selection of whole utterance-level factors that we take as a proxy for register or style in message-driven production accounts. Using a modern machine learning-oriented approach, we show that for both naturalistic stimuli and real-world corpora, producers prefer words to be longer in systematically different contexts, independent of the specific message they are trying to convey. We do not find evidence for regulation of uncertainty, as in information theoretic approaches. We offer suggestions for modification of the standard psycholinguistic production approach that emphasizes the need for the field to specify how message formulation influences lexical choice in multiword utterances.

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. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.

Agrammatic output in non-fluent, including Broca's, aphasia as a rational behavior

Background

Speech of individuals with non-fluent, including Broca's, aphasia is often characterized as "agrammatic" because their output mostly consists of nouns and, to a lesser extent, verbs and lacks function words, like articles and prepositions, and correct morphological endings. Among the earliest accounts of agrammatic output in the early 1900s was the "economy of effort" idea whereby agrammatic output is construed as a way of coping with increases in the cost of language production. This idea resurfaced in the 1980s, but in general, the field of language research has largely focused on accounts of agrammatism that postulated core deficits in syntactic knowledge.

Aims

We here revisit the economy of effort hypothesis in light of increasing emphasis in cognitive science on rational and efficient behavior.

Main contribution

The critical idea is as follows: there is a cost per unit of linguistic output, and this cost is greater for patients with non-fluent aphasia. For a rational agent, this increase leads to shorter messages. Critically, the informative parts of the message should be preserved and the redundant ones (like the function words and inflectional markers) should be omitted. Although economy of effort is unlikely to provide a unifying account of agrammatic output in all patients-the relevant population is too heterogeneous and the empirical landscape too complex for any single-factor explanation-we argue that the idea of agrammatic output as a rational behavior was dismissed prematurely and appears to provide a plausible explanation for a large subset of the reported cases of expressive aphasia.

Conclusions

The rational account of expressive agrammatism should be evaluated more carefully and systematically. On the basic research side, pursuing this hypothesis may reveal how the human mind and brain optimize communicative efficiency in the presence of production difficulties. And on the applied side, this construal of expressive agrammatism emphasizes the strengths of some patients to flexibly adapt utterances in order to communicate in spite of grammatical difficulties; and focusing on these strengths may be more effective than trying to "fix" their grammar.

Estimations of child linguistic productivity controlling for vocabulary and sample size

Children's use of present tense suffixes is less productive than that of their parents, after correcting for sample size and lexical knowledge, according to a recently established approach for the study of inflectional productivity. This article expands on this technique by providing precise estimates of early grammatical productivity through systematic random sampling and allowing for developmental assessment. Two cross-linguistic comparisons are given in the results of this study. Two Spanish-speaking children and their parents are compared with four English-speaking children and their parents. The second comparison examines potential differences in productivity throughout developmental stages using the same six children's speech. The findings indicate that Spanish-acquiring children are less productive than their parents while utilising the paradigm under study, but that productivity levels increase over time. In contrast, the English-speaking children's morphosyntactic production mirrors that of their parents. Although the primary focus of this research is methodological, these findings have consequences for theoretical theories arguing either rule abstraction or a restricted generalisation of early exemplars.