Mapping words to the world: Adults, but not children, understand how mismatching descriptions refer

How do children learn to connect expressions (e.g., "that red apple") to the real-world objects they refer to? The dominant view in developmental psychology is that children rely on descriptive information, "red" and "apple." In contrast, linguistic theories of the adult language attribute primacy to grammatical elements: words such as "that" or "another" first establish the status of potential referents within the discourse context (old or new) before descriptions can factor in. These theories predict that reference can succeed even when the description does not match the referent. We explored this novel prediction in adults and children. Over four experiments, we found that (a) adults relied on the articles to identify the referent, even when the description did not fit, consistent with grammar-first accounts; (b) consistent with description-first accounts, and unlike adults, 3- to 5-year-old children prioritized the descriptions provided by nouns and adjectives, despite being sensitive to grammatical information. This suggests that children connect expressions to referents differently from adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Properties of LoTs: The footprints or the bear itself?

There are two ways to understand any proposed properties of language-of-thoughts (LoTs): As diagnostic or constitutive. We argue that this choice is critical. If candidate properties are diagnostic, their homeostatic clustering requires explanation via an underlying homeostatic mechanism. If constitutive, there is no clustering, only the properties themselves. Whether deep neural networks (DNNs) are alternatives to LoTs or potential implementations turn on this choice.

It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation

How do learners learn what no and not mean when they are only presented with what is? Given its complexity, abstractness, and roles in logic, truth-functional negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. As a result, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a gradual conceptual change that is necessary to represent those words' logical meaning. However, it's also possible that linguistic expressions of negation take time to learn because of children's gradually increasing grasp of their language. To understand what no and not mean, children might first need to understand the rest of the sentences in which those words are used. We provide experimental evidence that conceptually equipped learners (adults) face the same acquisition challenges that children do when their access to linguistic information is restricted, which simulates how much language children understand at different points in acquisition. When watching a silenced video of naturalistic uses of negators by parents speaking to their children, adults could tell when the parent was prohibiting the child and struggled with inferring that negators were used to express logical negation. However, when provided with additional information about what else the parent said, guessing that the parent had expressed logical negation became easy for adults. Though our findings do not rule out that young learners also undergo conceptual change, they show that increasing understanding of language alone, with no accompanying conceptual change, can account for the gradual acquisition of negation words.

Conflict paradigms cannot reveal competence

De Neys is right to criticize the exclusivity assumption in dual-process theories, but he misses the original sin underlying this assumption, which his working model continues to share. Conflict paradigms, in which experimenters measure how one cognitive process interferes (or does not interfere) with another, license few inferences about how the interfered-with process works on its own.

Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought

"What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems.

Counting and the ontogenetic origins of exact equality

Humans are unique in their capacity to both represent number exactly and to express these representations symbolically. This correlation has prompted debate regarding whether symbolic number systems are necessary to represent large exact number. Previous work addressing this question in innumerate adults and semi-numerate children has been limited by conflicting results and differing methodologies, and has not yielded a clear answer. We address this debate by adapting methods used with innumerate populations (a "set-matching" task) for 3- to 5-year-old US children at varying stages of symbolic number acquisition. In five studies we find that children's ability to match sets exactly is related not simply to knowing the meanings of a few number words, but also to understanding how counting is used to generate sets (i.e., the cardinal principle). However, while children were more likely to match sets after acquiring the cardinal principle, they nevertheless demonstrated failures, compatible with the hypothesis that the ability to reason about exact equality emerges sometime later. These findings provide important data on the origin of exact number concepts, and point to knowledge of a counting system, rather than number language in general, as a key ingredient in the ability to reason about large exact number.

Getting to No: Pragmatic and Semantic Factors in Two- and Three-Year-Olds' Understanding of Negation

Although infants say "no" early, older children have difficulty understanding its truth-functional meaning. Two experiments investigate whether this difficulty stems from the infelicity of negative sentences out of the blue. In Experiment 1, given supportive discourse, 3-year-olds (N = 16) understood both affirmative and negative sentences. However, with sentence types randomized, 2-year-olds (N = 28) still failed. In Experiment 2, affirmative and negative sentences were blocked. Two-year-olds (N = 28) now succeeded, but only when affirmatives were presented first. Thus, although discourse felicity seems the primary bottleneck for 3-year-olds' understanding of negation, 2-year-olds struggle with its semantic processing. Contrary to accounts where negatives are understood via affirmatives, both sentence types were processed equally quickly, suggesting previously reported asymmetries are due to pragmatic accommodation, not semantic processing.

The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different

Quantifier words like each, every, all and three are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. "Every kid climbed a tree" could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences - those containing every, as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants' reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, all-a sentences prime other all-a sentences, while each-a primes each-a, but sentences with each do not prime sentences with all or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers - when one number (e.g. three) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. four) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language.

Infants' representations of others' goals: representing approach over avoidance

Goals fall into two broad types--approach and avoidance. Research on infants' early goal understanding has focused only on approach goals, usually assuming that infants will encode an ambiguous display where an actor picks one object over another as the actor wanting to approach the former rather than avoid the latter. We investigated infants' understanding of approach and avoidance separately by presenting 7-month-olds with a hand either consistently approaching, or consistently avoiding, an object. Infants dishabituated to a disruption of the consistent approach pattern, but not of the consistent avoidance pattern. In the second experiment, we show that 14-month-olds, who have a richer understanding of goals, still do not dishabituate when a hand first reaches to and picks up an object it has consistently avoided before. A third experiment found that 7-month-olds successfully dishabituated to the first motion of a previously stationary object when all the objects moved on their own with no hand present, ruling out several low-level interpretations of infants' failure to dishabituate to the violations of the avoidance pattern in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that infants do not represent avoidance from the same type of evidence they can use to represent approach.

Expressing fear enhances sensory acquisition

It has been proposed that facial expression production originates in sensory regulation. Here we demonstrate that facial expressions of fear are configured to enhance sensory acquisition. A statistical model of expression appearance revealed that fear and disgust expressions have opposite shape and surface reflectance features. We hypothesized that this reflects a fundamental antagonism serving to augment versus diminish sensory exposure. In keeping with this hypothesis, when subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localization and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration. The opposite pattern was found for disgust. Fear may therefore work to enhance perception, whereas disgust dampens it. These convergent results provide support for the Darwinian hypothesis that facial expressions are not arbitrary configurations for social communication, but rather, expressions may have originated in altering the sensory interface with the physical world.

Predictive value of fractional excretion of filtered sodium for hypertension in acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis

The course of acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis was followed in 81 children, 66 of whom were hypertensive on admission. Sixty-one hypertensive patients were available for follow-up; in seven (11.5%), hypertension recurred 1 to 9 days after initial blood pressure elevation had returned to normal. Thirteen initially normotensive patients were available for follow-up; six (46%) developed hypertension 1 to 9 days after admission. Initial FENa was less than or equal to 0.5 in all 13 patients with recurrence of initial hypertension or who developed initial hypertension while under observation, and in another 25 patients who did not have this course. On the other hand, FENa was greater than 0.5 in 36 patients, none of whom had recurrence of initial hypertension or developed hypertension while under observation. Therefore, an admission FENa less than or equal to 0.5 seems to be an accurate predictor for development of hypertensive episodes.

[Arteriovenous fistula and thrombosis of the renal vein: complication of a surgical renal biopsy]

Hematuria is the most common complication of renal biopsy. Other complications are less frequent, but some of them may be life threatening. Herein, we present a case or recurrent hematuria. Within one year, two renal biopsies were surgically performed in this patient. The histological diagnosis reported minimal change glomerular lesions. Complications arose after the second biopsy, with development of an abdominal mass in the left side with severe pain. IVP showed absence of dye excretion from the left kidney. Renal arteriogram showed an arteriovenous fistula in the lower pole and absence of venous circulation in the same side. This data was consistent with renal vein thrombosis. The fistula was a complication of the renal biopsy, and most likely, the renal vein thrombosis developed from the fistula. Both complications disappeared spontaneously, the patient is asymptomatic and the IVP is normal. We conclude that the renal biopsy is not a harmless surgical procedure and it is necessary to carry out a through evaluation in order to justify the necessity to perform it.

[Chronic peritoneal dialysis in childhood]

Peritoneal dialysis, used initially (1923) for the management of acute renal failure, became obsolete very soon, because of its infectious complications. Due to this and because of the successful advent of hemodialysis with the artificial kidney in the 40's, peritoneal catheter of indefinite tolerance came into use. This circumstance allowed the use of peritoneal dialysis in the management of chronic uremia. At the onset, it was used intermittently within the hospital and the dialysant solutions were changed by the medical staff. Subsequently, a continuous ambulatory scheme developed, where 4 to 5 changes are dialy made outdoors by the patient or his relatives which cuts down costs and allows more freedom of action and better feeding. Peritonitis still remains as a disadvantage; however, its incidence has dropped because of technical improvements of the equipment. It is concluded that peritoneal dialysis, but specially with the ambulatory scheme, offers a great rehabilitation potentiality for the uremic child.

[Anemia in chronic renal insufficiency]

Anemia is the most common hematologic disturbance of patients with chronic renal failure. It is usually normocytic, normochromic and the bone marrow does not show erythroblastic compensatory changes. The anemia is the resultant of different factors; inadequate erythropoiesis, hemolysis and bleeding, being the former the most important mechanism. The important role of the erythropoietin and its mechanism of production are discussed. Patients in intermittent peritoneal dialysis program show higher hemoglobin concentration than patients in chronic hemodialysis. The authors mention the therapeutic approach used to minimize the anemia emphasizing the need of reducing the number of blood transfusions (unless absolutely necessary), since they inhibit erythropoiesis.

[Treatment of arterial hypertension in children]

The blood pressure is the resultant of the relationship of three different factors: cardiac output, peripheral vascular resistance and blood volume. The etiology of hypertension in children is variable; however increased peripheral vascular resistance (renin dependent) and increased blood volume (sodium dependent), play a role in a variable degree in most cases of hypertension. Increased blood volume is the predominant factor in some cases of (acute glomerulonephritis), whereas vasoconstriction is the most important mechanism in others (renal segmental hypoplasia). Therefore, it becomes important to evaluate each individual case in order to approach therapy. Diuretics are indicated in patients with hypertension secondary to hypervolemia, while antihypertensives are more useful in cases with vasoconstriction. The scheme of treatment for acute hypertensive crises followed in the Department of Nephrology of the Hospital Infantil de Mexico is presented by the authors. A review of the most commonly antihypertensives used in Pediatrics is made, regarding mainly mechanisms of action, indications, recommended doses and side effects.

Post-mortem aeroportography

The authors suggest a new methodology for the study of the intrahepatic portal system, using atmospheric air as a contrast medium. They used 48 livers of normal and pathological corpses, obtaining post-mortem cholangiographies and vinyl molds. Comparing the images obtained with literature data and with the vinyl molds, the authors conclude that the method is accurate, presenting furthermore many advantages with regard to contrasts generally used, such as low cost, easy performance, possibility repeating the radiographs as many times as necessary, and the possibility of simultaneous obtaining contrasts of other intra-hepatic systems by use of other radio-opaque contrast media in another system, as for example the biliary or the arterial system.

The intra-hepatic biliary system in cirrhósis

The authors study 14 cirrhotic livers by means of post-mortem cholangiography and vinyl casts. They analyze the radiographs according to thorough criterions, described in the text, and come to the conclusion that intrahepatic biliary ducts in cirrhotic livers present serious alterations, represented by distorted ducts with focal stenoses, nodular impressions, wall irregularities, increase of the number of obtuse angles and poor peripheral filling, which confer a disharmonic aspect to the intra-hepatic biliary ducts of these organs. Furthermore, they show that livers with post-necrotic cirrhosis present bile ducts much more seriously damaged than those with Laennec's cirrhosis. The paper was submitted to statistical analysis and allows objective conclusions.