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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Late bilinguals whose L1 allows subject omission tend to be more explicit in reference: they use more overt pronouns and full NPs than null pronouns? Why is that? We test two hypotheses (a desire to avoid ambiguity or ease processing) using online eye-tracking. (16/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Yajun Liu, Antonella Sorace, @kennysmithed.bsky.social: Do bilinguals avoid ambiguity? An experimental study of lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin (Poster Session 2, P2-L-114, 1 August @ 10:30). Poster here: tinyurl.com/mr288rn8 blurb below 👇 (15/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Bilingual experience may influence native speakers’ choice of referring expressions. We explore the impact of Crosslinguistic influence on reference production when both languages permit subject drop yet differ typologically. (14/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Yajun Liu, Antonella Sorace, @kennysmithed.bsky.social: Beyond Crosslinguistic Influence: Mandarin Speakers with Exposure to Null-subject Languages Nonetheless Use Fewer Null Pronouns in Mandarin (Talk 12: Lang 2, 31 Jul @ 14:59). Blurb below 👇 (13/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Find out more from @psydelle.bsky.social & @ivegner.bsky.social's poster: July 31 @conll-conf.bsky.social Paper: edin.ac/4kdIzYP (2/2)

What does memory retrieval leave on the table? Modelling the Cost...

Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this...

edin.ac

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Semi-compositional language like “kick the habit” takes longer for humans to process than both fully-compositional AND fully-idiomatic units! Also, a memory model with sBERT embeddings fails more on the same items. What's so special about these units? (1/2) 👇

What does memory retrieval leave on the table? Modelling the Cost...

Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this...

edin.ac

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Learn more at @marthaflinders.bsky.social @psydelle.bsky.social @ivegner.bsky.social's talk+panel @aclmeeting.bsky.social Jul 30, 9am Hall A! tinyurl.com/3bb3umhc (2/2)

Behavioural vs. Representational Systematicity in End-to-End Models: An Opinionated Survey

A core aspect of compositionality, systematicity is a desirable property in ML models as it enables strong generalization to novel contexts. This has led to numerous studies proposing benchmarks to as...

tinyurl.com

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Different ML datasets use wildly different definitions of “systematic generalization”. To REALLY tell how well a model generalizes, we must look for systematicity of the model's representations. (1/2) 👇

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

🧠 Check out our #CogSci2025 poster examining why languages avoid words like “peeb” or “gok”?
Our study found that people struggle to recognise words where consonants share the same place of articulation. This processing cost could contribute to why such words are rare across languages 🌏 (12/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Annie Holtz @anniesotropic.bsky.social, @kennysmithed.bsky.social, Mitsuhiko Ota: The Impact of Similar Place Avoidance on Novel Word Learning in Adults (Virtual Poster Session 1, V1-H-87, 31 Jul @ 12:00). Poster here: tinyurl.com/bdf9zrsc blurb below 👇 (11/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

RSA succeeds in explaining phenomena in language use, but it oddly predicts a preference for ambiguous costly words in learning. We test this surprising prediction using artificial word learning and lexicon rating tasks. (10/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Ponrawee Prasertsom, @kennysmithed.bsky.social, Jennifer Culbertson: Testing counterintuitive predictions about cost-based inferences in learning from the Rational Speech Act model (Poster Session 1; P1-P-159, 31 July @ 14:15). Poster here: tinyurl.com/3uxd7krp blurb below 👇 (9/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Languages differ dramatically in how they categorise family members - what drives this semantic variation? For 1215 languages, our computational model reveals a hierarchy of semantic features for kinship, suggesting that kin term semantics are optimised for efficient communication. (8/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

@maisyhallam.bsky.social, Fiona Jordan, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @kennysmithed.bsky.social: Efficient communication drives the semantic structure of kinship terminology (Poster session 3, P3-H-71, 2 Aug @ 13:00) poster here: tinyurl.com/42fup6cm blurb below 👇 (7/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Using Artificial language learning, we test whether people of different neurotypes accommodate differently to each other, and whether this impacts long-term regularisation. (6/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 25

Lauren Fletcher @leffletcher.bsky.social, Jennifer Culbertson, Hugh Rabagliati: Neuro-identity mixing impacts linguistic accommodation and regularisation: evidence from autistic and allistic interactions (Talks 3: Language 1, 31 Jul @ 10:52) blurb below 👇 (5/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 17

Shira Tal, Benedek Bartha, Jennifer Culbertson: Developmental evidence for sensitivity to hierarchical structure in the noun phrase (Talks 13: Language and Development 1, 31 July @ 14:37): Do children show a preference for typologically common NP order? We use 'iconic ALL' to find out... (4/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 17

Previous CLE research shows that learning AND communication are necessary for evolving efficient languages...but IB models suggest that efficient systems may emerge in IL experiments without both! (3/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 17

Nathaniel Imel, Jennifer Culbertson, @simonkirby.bsky.social & @nogazs.bsky.social:
Iterated language learning is shaped by a drive for optimizing lossy compression (Talks 37: Language and Computation 3, 1 August @ 16:22; blurb below) (2/)

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 17

Less than 3 weeks to go until #CogSci2025! Here is some of the work that members of the CLE will be presenting 🧵(1/)

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Reposted by Centre for Language Evolution

Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Jul 8

Really awesome study by ‪@kennysmithed.bsky.social‬‬, Josephine Bowerman & @andrewdmsmith.bsky.social out now in Cognition: Semantic extension in a novel communication system is facilitated by salient shared associations
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Semantic extension in a novel communication system is facilitated by salient shared associations

Creative processes of semantic extension play a key role in language change, grammaticalisation, and (by hypothesis) the early origins and evolution o…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Centre for Language Evolution

Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Jul 10

Some happy science news (a small light in times of darkness). New paper out with @luciewolters.bsky.social and Mits Ota: : Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Skewed distributions facilitate infants' word segmentation

Infants can use statistical patterns to segment continuous speech into words, a crucial task in language acquisition. Experimental studies typically i…

sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Centre for Language Evolution

Aislinn Keogh @mandolinguist.bsky.social · Jul 7

Introducing Dr Keogh! 🎓 Very emotional to have finally closed the chapter on my time at the @uoe-cle.bsky.social 😭 but glad to have passed this milestone in the company of my wonderful supervisors @simonkirby.bsky.social and Jenny Culbertson, and my PhD twin Elizabeth Pankratz. We made it!

#PhDone

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jul 7

Language and Communication is on the GESDA science breakthrough radar for the first time! Language evolution, AI, empirical method and multilingualism are the four core topics. Make your views known on how likely breakthroughs are in these areas, and how soon they might happen: tinyurl.com/2r29yep6

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Centre for Language Evolution @uoe-cle.bsky.social · Jun 30

Join us at the National Museum of Scotland July 19th to learn about animal communication and what makes human communication different from the rest of our primate family! 🐵 www.nms.ac.uk/events/monke...

A blonde woman in a grey t-shirt and a brunette woman in a red vest sit at a table. Both are smiling. On the table there is a plush monkey toy, a blue tray, and a green vine.

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