Joshua K. Hartshorne

Understanding how and when cognitive change occurs over the life span is a prerequisite for understanding normal and abnormal development and aging. Most studies of cognitive change are constrained, however, in their ability to detect subtle, but theoretically informative life-span changes, as they rely on either comparing broad age groups or sparse sampling across the age range. Here, we present convergent evidence from 48,537 online participants and a comprehensive analysis of normative data from standardized IQ and memory tests. Our results reveal considerable heterogeneity in when cognitive abilities peak: Some abilities peak and begin to decline around high school graduation; some abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in subjects’ 30s; and still others do not peak until subjects reach their 40s or later. These findings motivate a nuanced theory of maturation and age-related decline, in which multiple, dissociable factors differentially affect different domains of cognition.

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for “difficult” syntactic phenomena but also for “easy” syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

Gilbert et al . conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration’s Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect ( p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate the original effects. We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replication studies. We administered the RP:P and revised protocols in multiple laboratories (median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5, range = 3–9; median total sample = 1,279.5, range = 276–3,512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, following the preregistered analysis plan, we found that the revised protocols produced effect sizes similar to those of the RP:P protocols (Δ r = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for the revised protocols ( r = .05) was similar to that of the RP:P protocols ( r = .04) and the original RP:P replications ( r = .11), and smaller than that of the original studies ( r = .37). Analysis of the cumulative evidence across the original studies and the corresponding three replication attempts provided very precise estimates of the 10 tested effects and indicated that their effect sizes (median r = .07, range = .00–.15) were 78% smaller, on average, than the original effect sizes (median r = .37, range = .19–.50).

The increase in children’s screen time over the last few decades has concerned parents, educators, and policymakers alike, due to its association with negative developmental outcomes. Interventions have focused on cautioning parents against screen time and coaching them on how to limit it. Such interventions are unlikely to be effective if screen time is driven less by parental preference than by parental necessity, supplementing insufficient adult caretaker availability. We show that during the COVID crisis, screen time in the United States increased dramatically as a direct result of sudden decrease in adult caretaker availability. This indicates that lower screen time rates prior to the pandemic were not (merely) a function of well-informed parenting but of well-resourced parenting. It also supports claims that the associations between screen time and developmental outcomes are epiphenomenal and due to their joint dependence on family well being.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is highly heterogeneous. Identifying systematic individual differences in neuroanatomy could inform diagnosis and personalized interventions. The challenge is that these differences are entangled with variation because of other causes: individual differences unrelated to ASD and measurement artifacts. We used contrastive deep learning to disentangle ASD-specific neuroanatomical variation from variation shared with typical control participants. ASD-specific variation correlated with individual differences in symptoms. The structure of this ASD-specific variation also addresses a long-standing debate about the nature of ASD: At least in terms of neuroanatomy, individuals do not cluster into distinct subtypes; instead, they are organized along continuous dimensions that affect distinct sets of regions.

Recent reports have suggested that many published results are unreliable. To increase the reliability and accuracy of published papers, multiple changes have been proposed, such as changes in statistical methods. We support such reforms. However, we believe that the incentive structure of scientific publishing must change for such reforms to be successful. Under the current system, the quality of individual scientists is judged on the basis of their number of publications and citations, with journals similarly judged via numbers of citations. Neither of these measures takes into account the replicability of the published findings, as false or controversial results are often particularly widely cited. We propose tracking replications as a means of post-publication evaluation, both to help researchers identify reliable findings and to incentivize the publication of reliable results. Tracking replications requires a database linking published studies that replicate one another. As any such database is limited by the number of replication attempts published, we propose establishing an open-access journal dedicated to publishing replication attempts. Data quality of both the database and the affiliated journal would be ensured through a combination of crowd-sourcing and peer review. As reports in the database are aggregated, ultimately it will be possible to calculate replicability scores, which may be used alongside citation counts to evaluate the quality of work published in individual journals. In this paper, we lay out a detailed description of how this system could be implemented, including mechanisms for compiling the information, ensuring data quality, and incentivizing the research community to participate.

ABSTRACT In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years.

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. holded) produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held) better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars (folded, molded). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold+-ed). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked) that men generally compose with the grammatical system (walk+-ed). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language.

Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated.Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%.This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals.

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as “implicit causality”. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightened Mary because she … with Sally feared Mary because she…). A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs. However, such studies have focused on a small number of specially selected verbs. In Experiment 1, we find that existing taxonomies perform near chance at predicting pronoun-resolution bias on a large set of representative verbs. However, a more fine-grained taxonomy recently proposed in the linguistics literature does significantly better. In Experiment 2, we tested all 264 verbs in two of the narrowly defined verb classes from this new taxonomy, finding that pronoun-resolution biases were categorically different. These findings suggest that the semantic structure of verbs tightly constrains the interpretation of pronouns in causal sentences, raising challenges for theories which posit that implicit causality biases reflect world knowledge or arbitrary lexical features.

Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., Sally ate some of the cookies implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or instead a complex, contextualized inference. We find that in sentences like If Sally ate some of the cookies, then the rest are on the counter, that the rest triggers a late, sustained positivity relative to Sally ate some of the cookies, and the rest are on the counter. This is consistent with behavioral results and linguistic theory suggesting that the former sentence does not trigger a scalar implicature. This motivates a view on which scalar implicature is contextualized but dependent on grammatical structure.

Initially inspired by the Atkinson and Shiffrin model, researchers have spent a half century investigating whether actively maintaining an item in working memory (WM) leads to improved subsequent long-term memory (LTM). Empirical results have been inconsistent, and thus the answer to the question remains unclear. We present evidence from 13 new experiments as well as a meta-analysis of 61 published experiments. Both the new experiments and meta-analysis show clear evidence that increased WM maintenance of a stimulus leads to superior recognition for that stimulus in subsequent LTM tests. This effect appears robust across a variety of experimental design parameters, suggesting that the variability in prior results in the literature is probably due to low power and random chance. The results support theories on which there is a close link between WM and LTM mechanisms, while challenging claims that this relationship is specific to verbal memory and evolved to support language acquisition.

The Simon, Stroop, and Eriksen flanker tasks are commonly used to assess cognitive control across the lifespan. However, it remains unclear whether these three tasks in fact measure the same cognitive abilities and in the same proportion. We take a developmental approach to this question: if the Simon, Stroop, and flanker tasks all roughly measure the same capacity, they should show similar patterns of age-related change. We present data from two massive online cross-sectional studies: Study 1 included 9,585 native English speakers between 10 and 80 years of age who completed the Simon and Stroop tasks, and Study 2 included 13,448 English speakers between 10 and 79 years of age who completed the flanker task. Of the three tasks, only the flanker task revealed an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory, with performance improving until approximately 23 years of age and declining starting around 40 years of age. Performance on the Simon and Stroop tasks peaked around 34 and 26 years of age, respectively, and did not decline significantly in later life, though it is possible that age-related declines would be observed with more difficult versions of the tasks. Although the Simon and Stroop tasks are commonly interpreted to target similar underlying processes, we observed near zero correlations between the congruency effects observed in each task in terms of both accuracy and response time. We discuss these results in light of recent debates regarding the suitability of these tasks for assessing developmental and individual differences in cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightens Mary because she … with Sally loves Mary because she …). This “implicit causality” phenomenon is understood to reflect intuitions about who caused the event. Researchers have debated whether these intuitions are based on linguistic structure or instead a function of high-level, non-linguistic cognition. Two lines of evidence support the latter conclusion: implicit causality is related to a broad social judgement task, and it is affected by general knowledge about the participants in the event. On closer inspection, neither of these claims have been established. Eight new experiments find that (a) the relationship between implicit causality and the social judgement task is tenuous, and (b) previously employed event-participant manipulations have minimal to no effect on implicit causality. These findings support an account on which implicit causality is driven primarily by linguistic structure and only minimally by general knowledge and non-linguistic cognition.

Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he… (he=Archibald) with Archibald criticized Bartholomew because he… (he=Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from world knowledge. We report evidence favoring the former account. We elicited pronoun biases for 502 verbs from seven Levin verb classes in two discourse contexts (implicit causality and implicit consequentiality), showing that in both contexts, verb class reliably predicts pronoun bias. These results confirm and extend recent findings about implicit causality and represent the first such study for implicit consequentiality. We discuss these findings in the context of recent work in semantics, and also develop a new, probabilistic generative account of pronoun interpretation.

Half of the world's population has internet access. In principle, researchers are no longer limited to subjects they can recruit into the laboratory. Any study that can be run on a computer or mobile device can be run with nearly any demographic anywhere in the world, and in large numbers. This has allowed scientists to effectively run hundreds of experiments at once. Despite their transformative power, such studies remain rare for practical reasons: the need for sophisticated software, the difficulty of recruiting so many subjects, and a lack of research paradigms that make effective use of their large amounts of data, due to such realities as that they require sophisticated software in order to run effectively. We present Pushkin: an open-source platform for designing and conducting massive experiments over the internet. Pushkin allows for a wide range of behavioral paradigms, through integration with the intuitive and flexible jsPsych experiment engine. It also addresses the basic technical challenges associated with massive, worldwide studies, including auto-scaling, extensibility, machine-assisted experimental design, multisession studies, and data security.

The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across languages should show similar pronoun resolution effects, but these claims run contrary to recent analyses on which much of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is susceptible to cross-cultural variation, and in fact there is little data in the literature to decide the question one way or another. Analysis of data in eight languages representing four historically unrelated language families reveals consistent pronoun resolution biases for emotion verbs, suggesting that the information upon which implicit causality pronoun resolution biases are derived is stable across languages and cultures.

The ability to attain native-like proficiency of a second language is heavily dependent on the age at which learning begins. However, the exact properties of this phenomenon remain unclear, and the literature is divided. Recently, Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, & Pinker presented a novel computational analysis of over 600,000 subjects, estimating that the ability to learn syntax drops at 17.4 years of age [Hartshorne, J. K., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition, 177, 263–277]. However, the novelty of the dataset and analyses raises questions and suggests caution [Frank, M. C. (2018). With great data comes great (theoretical) opportunity. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(8), 669–671]. In the present paper, we address several such concerns by employing improved psychometric measurement, calculating confidence intervals, and considering alternative models. We also present data from an additional 466,607 subjects. The results support the prior report of a sharp decline in the ability to learn syntax, commencing at the tail end of adolescence.

The target article argues researchers should be more ambitious, designing studies that systematically and comprehensively explore the space of possible experiments in one fell swoop. We argue that while "systematic" is rarely achievable, "comprehensive" is often enough. Critically, the recent popularization of massive online experiments shows that comprehensive studies are achievable for most cognitive and behavioral research questions.

ABSTRACT Famously, dog bites man is trivia whereas man bites dog is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic role and syntactic position. These mappings are typically predictable, and previous work demonstrates that young children are sensitive to these patterns and so could use them in acquisition. However, there is only limited and mixed evidence that children do use this information to guide acquisition outside of the laboratory. We find that children understand emotion verbs which follow the canonical CAUSE–VERB–PATIENT pattern ( Mary frightened/delighted John ) earlier than those which do not ( Mary feared/liked John ), despite the latter's higher frequency, suggesting children's generalization of the mapping between causativity and transitivity is broad and active in acquisition.

Abstract Widespread failures of replication and generalization are, ironically, a scientific triumph, in that they confirm the fundamental metascientific theory that underlies our field. Generalizable and replicable findings require testing large numbers of subjects from a wide range of demographics with a large, randomly‐sampled stimulus set, and using a variety of experimental parameters. Because few studies accomplish any of this, meta‐scientists predict that findings will frequently fail to replicate or generalize. We argue that to be more robust and replicable, developmental psychology needs to find a mechanism for collecting data at a greater scale and from more diverse populations. Luckily, this mechanism already exists as follows: Citizen science, in which large numbers of uncompensated volunteers provide data. While best‐known for its contributions to astronomy and ecology, citizen science has also produced major findings in neuroscience and psychology, and increasingly in developmental psychology. We provide examples, address practical challenges, discuss limitations, and compare to other methods of obtaining large datasets. Ultimately, we argue that the range of studies where it makes sense *not* to use citizen science is steadily dwindling.

Any given verb can appear in some syntactic frames (Sally broke the vase, The vase broke) but not others (*Sally broke at the vase, *Sally broke the vase to John).There is now considerable evidence that the syntactic behaviors of some verbs can be predicted by their meanings, and many current theories posit that this is true for most if not all verbs.If true, this fact would have striking implications for theories and models of language acquisition, as well as numerous applications in natural language processing.However, empirical investigations to date have focused on a small number of verbs.We report on early results from VerbCorner, a crowd-sourced project extending this work to a large, representative sample of English verbs.

Abstract Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications ( N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.

The increase in children's screen time over the last few decades has concerned parents, educators, and policymakers alike, due to its association with negative developmental outcomes. Interventions have focused on educating parents about the apparent dangers and coaching them on how to limit screen time. Such interventions are unlikely to be effective if screen time is driven less by parental preference than by parental necessity, supplementing insufficient adult caretaker availability. We show that during the COVID crisis, screen time increased dramatically as a direct result of sudden decrease in adult caretaker availability. This indicates that lower screen time rates prior to the pandemic were not (merely) a function of well-informed parenting but of well-resourced parenting. We discuss implications for policy, as well as for the ongoing scientific debate about whether screen time is actually problematic for development.

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be mapped onto syntactic subjects), not all verbs fit neatly into these generalizations. One particularly striking example is verbs of psychological state: The experiencer of the state can appear as either the subject (Agnes fears/hates/loves Bartholomew) or the direct object (Agnes frightens/angers/delights Bartholomew). The present studies explore whether this apparent variability in subject/object mapping may actually result from differences in these verbs’ underlying meanings. Specifically, we suggest that verbs like fear describe a habitual attitude towards some entity whereas verbs like frighten describe an externally caused emotional episode. We find that this distinction systematically characterizes verbs in English, Mandarin, and Korean. This pattern is generalized to novel verbs by adults in English, Japanese, and Russian, and even by English-speaking children who are just beginning to acquire psych verbs. This results support a broad role for systematic mappings between semantics and syntax in language acquisition.

We report the first set of results in a multi-year project to assess the robustness – and the factors promoting robustness – of the adult statistical word segmentation literature. This includes eight total experiments replicating six different experiments. The purpose of these replications is to assess the reproducibility of reported experiments, examine the replicability of their results, and provide more accurate effect size estimates. Reproducibility was mixed, with several papers either lacking crucial details or containing errors in the description of method, making it difficult to ascertain what was done. Replicability was also mixed: although in every instance we confirmed above-chance statistical word segmentation, many theoretically important moderations of that learning failed to replicate. Moreover, learning success was generally much lower than in the original studies. In the General Discussion, we consider whether these differences are due to differences in subject populations, low power in the original studies, or some combination of these and other factors. We also consider whether these findings are likely to generalize to the broader statistical word segmentation literature.

This research describes efforts to use crowdsourcing to improve the validity of the semantic predicates in VerbNet, a lexicon of about 6300 English verbs. The current semantic predicates can be thought of semantic primitives, into which the concepts denoted by a verb can be decomposed. For example, the verb spray (of the Spray class), involves the predicates MOTION, NOT, and LOCATION, where the event can be decomposed into an AGENT causing a THEME that was originally not in a particular location to now be in that location. Although VerbNet’s predicates are theoretically well-motivated, systematic empirical data is scarce. This paper describes a recently-launched attempt to address this issue with a series of human judgment tasks, posed to subjects in the form of games.

What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosity of song events; that musical behavior varies more within societies than across societies on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography, analyzed through four representations (machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, expert transcriptions), revealed that identifiable acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral function worldwide, and that these features fall along two dimensions, melodic and rhythmic complexity. These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing longstanding debates about each.

Experiencing a good change blindness task leads easily to questions of whether, how, and why individuals may differ in their tendency to detect or miss changes. Yet our understanding of individual differences in both change detection and its allied domain of visual working memory remain limited. To address this gap in our knowledge, we conducted two large, web-based studies of change detection using a flicker paradigm where a display of blue and yellow dots flashes on and off, over and over, until the participant detects and clicks on the one dot that is alternating from blue to yellow and back. In our first study (n=1542 unselected web participants), we found that the simple time to detect change (TDC) is highly consistent within individuals across trials; therefore, an individual's TDC ability can be captured reliably in under five minutes (Cronbach's alpha reliability = 0.77). TDC also correlated more highly with a visual working memory test than a vocabulary test (r’s -0.34 and -0.09, respectively; difference p<0.0001), confirming that TDC performance has more to do with visual working memory than with general intelligence or attentiveness. In our second study, the correlation of TDC amongst 205 monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs (r=0.63) was high relative to the upper bound of 0.77 set by TDC's reliability, indicating that TDC is highly familial. Moreover, the correlation of TDC amongst 113 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs (r=0.37) was much lower than that amongst MZ twin pairs (difference p<0.001), indicating a substantial genetic influence. In sum, flicker change detection is a specific, heritable ability whose ease of measurement makes it an ideal candidate for use in large-scale molecular genetic as well as focused training and intervention studies. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012

The fact that children are far more likely to successfully acquire a variety of new skills and knowledge than are adults is so clearly evidenced in everyday life that it hardly needs scientific confirmation. However, despite four decades of intensive research, the reason why remains controversial. In fact, the terms of the debate about critical periods in language have hardly changed since the 1960s. I argue that this is because the standard in-lab research paradigms that have otherwise served psychology well are fundamentally ill-suited to the study of critical and sensitive periods. In particular, this research requires samples that are far more diverse and orders of magnitude larger than can be achieved in the lab. I show that massive online experiments provide an exciting and productive alternative.

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replications from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) in which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection and only one of which was “statistically significant” (p &amp;lt; .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate (Gilbert et al., 2016). We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replications. We administered the RP:P and Revised protocols in multiple laboratories (Median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5; Range 3 to 9; Median total sample = 1279.5; Range 276 to 3512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, Revised protocols produced similar effect sizes as RP:P protocols following the preregistered analysis plan (Δr = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for Revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than the original studies (r = .37). The cumulative evidence of original study and three replication attempts suggests that effect sizes for all 10 (median r = .07; range .00 to .15) are 78% smaller on average than original findings (median r = .37; range .19 to .50), with very precisely estimated effects.

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replications from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) in which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection and only one of which was “statistically significant” (p &amp;lt; .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate (Gilbert et al., 2016). We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replications. We administered the RP:P and Revised protocols in multiple laboratories (Median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5; Range 3 to 9; Median total sample = 1279.5; Range 276 to 3512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, Revised protocols produced similar effect sizes as RP:P protocols following the preregistered analysis plan (Δr = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for Revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than the original studies (r = .37). The cumulative evidence of original study and three replication attempts suggests that effect sizes for all 10 (median r = .07; range .00 to .15) are 78% smaller on average than original findings (median r = .37; range .19 to .50), with very precisely estimated effects.

Board, card, or video games have been played by virtually every individual in the world population, with both children and adults participating. Games are popular because they are intuitive and fun. These distinctive qualities of games also make them ideal as a platform for studying the mind. By being intuitive, games provide a unique vantage point for understanding the inductive biases that support behavior in more complex, ecological settings than traditional lab experiments. By being fun, games allow researchers to study new questions in cognition such as the meaning of "play'' and intrinsic motivation, while also supporting more extensive and diverse data collection by attracting many more participants. We describe both the advantages and drawbacks of using games relative to standard lab-based experiments and lay out a set of recommendations on how to gain the most from using games to study cognition. We hope this article will lead to a wider use of games as experimental paradigms, elevating the ecological validity, scale, and robustness of research on the mind.

Cognitive science has evolved since early disputes between radical empiricism and radical nativism. The authors are reacting to the revival of radical empiricism spurred by recent successes in deep neural network (NN) models. We agree that language-like mental representations (language-of-thoughts [LoTs]) are part of the best game in town, but they cannot be understood independent of the other players.

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Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations - contrast and entailment - to reason about the meanings of 'unknown' number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown number, all unknown numbers begin with an existential meaning akin to some. In Experiment 1, we tested an alternative hypothesis, that because numbers belong to a scale of contrasting alternatives, children assign them a meaning distinct from some. In the "Don't Give-a-Number task", children were shown three kinds of fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries), and asked to not give either some or a number of one kind (e.g. Give everything, but not [some/five] bananas). While children tended to give zero bananas when asked to not give some, they gave positive amounts when asked to not give numbers. This suggests that contrast - plus knowledge of a number's membership in a count list - enables children to differentiate the meanings of unknown number words from the meaning of some. Experiment 2 tested whether children's interpretation of unknown numbers is further constrained by understanding numerical entailment relations - that if someone, e.g. has three, they thereby also have two, but if they do not have three, they also do not have four. On critical trials, children saw two characters with different quantities of fish, two apart (e.g. 2 vs. 4), and were asked about the number in-between - who either has or doesn't have, e.g. three. Children picked the larger quantity for the affirmative, and the smaller for the negative prompts even when all the numbers were unknown, suggesting that they understood that, whatever three means, a larger quantity is more likely to contain that many, and a smaller quantity is more likely not to. We conclude by discussing how contrast and entailment could help children scaffold the exact meanings of unknown number words.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Finn &amp;amp; Hudson Kam (2008) The curse of knowledge: First language knowledge impairs adult learners’ use of novel statistics for word segmentation, Cognition, 108, 477-499, as part of a multi-year effort to replicate every adult statistical word segmentation study. Unlike the original study, we do not find clear evidence that English-speaking adults fail to successfully segment words that violate the phonotactic constraints of English.

Lakoff (2016) describes an account of conceptual representation based in part on metaphor. Though promising, this account faces several challenges with respect to learning and development.

As part of the Many Labs 5 project, we ran a replication of van Dijk, van Kleef, Steinel, and van Beest’s (2008) study examining the effect of emotions in negotiations. They reported that when the consequences of rejection were low, subjects offered fewer chips to angry bargaining partners than to happy partners. We ran this replication under three protocols: the protocol used in the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, a revised protocol, and an online protocol. The effect averaged one ninth the size of the originally reported effect and was significant only for the revised protocol. However, the difference between the original and revised protocols was not significant.

While it is clear that children are more successful at learning language than adults are—whether first language or second—there is no agreement as to why. Is it due to greater neural plasticity, greater motivation, more ample opportunity for learning, superior cognitive function, lack of interference from a first language, or something else? A difficulty in teasing apart these theories is that while they make different empirical predictions, there are few unambiguous facts against which to test the theories. This is particularly true when it comes to the most basic questions about the phenomenon: When does the childhood advantage dissipate, and how rapidly does it do so? I argue that a major reason for the lack of consensus is limitations in the research methods used to date. I conclude by discussing a recently emerging methodology and by making suggestions about the path forward.

While there is no doubt that children raised bilingual can become extremely proficient in both languages, theorists are divided on whether bilingualism is effectively monolingualism twice (the “Two Monolinguals in One Brain” hypothesis) or differs in some fundamental way from monolingualism. A strong version of the “Two Monolinguals” hypothesis predicts that bilinguals can achieve monolingual-level proficiency in either (or both) of their languages. Recently, Bylund and Abrahamsson argued that evidence of lower syntactic proficiency in simultaneous bilinguals was due to confounds of language dominance; when simultaneous bilinguals are tested in their primary language, any difference disappears. We find no evidence for this hypothesis. Meta-analysis and Monte Carlo simulation show that variation in published results is fully consistent with sampling error, with no evidence that method mattered. Meta-analytic estimates strongly indicate lower syntactic performance by simultaneous bilinguals relative to monolinguals. Re-analysis of a large dataset (N = 115,020) confirms this finding, even controlling for language dominance. Interestingly, the effect is relatively small, challenging current theories.

Linking Meaning to Language: Linguistic Universals and Variation Joshua K. Hartshorne (jharts@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, Harvard University 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Timothy J. O'Donnell (timo@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, Harvard University 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Yasutada Sudo (ysudo@mit.edu) Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Mass. Ave. 32-D808, Cambridge, MA 02139 Miki Uruwashi (mikiuruwashi@ruri.waseda.jp) Graduate School of Human Sciences, Waseda University 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Jesse Snedeker (snedeker@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, Harvard University 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Abstract To use natural language, speakers must map the participants in events or states in the world onto grammatical roles. There remains considerable disagreement about the nature of these so-called linking rules (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005). In order to probe the nature of linking rules, we investigate verbs of psychological state, which demonstrate complex linking patterns both within and between languages. We find that the typical duration of the psychological state guides the application of linking rules to novel verbs in both English and Japanese, consistent with a universal constraint. Nonetheless, there are marked differences in the baseline preferences for the individual linking rules across the two languages. We discuss these findings both in terms of theories of exceptionless linking rules and accounts on which linking rules are governed by probabilistic biases as well as cross- linguistic variation. Keywords: syntax; semantics; linking; UTAH; universal grammar; over-hypotheses. The Linking Problem To interpret Mary broke the vase, one must minimally identify the event described (breaking), the participants in that event (Mary, vase), and identify which participant played which role (Mary = breaker, not break-ee). This linking problem has received considerable attention both by theorists trying to correctly characterize the semantics- syntax links (see Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005, for review), and by developmental psychologists interested in how children discover these links (Bowerman, 1990; Pinker, A key issue is identifying the right level of generalization for the linking rules. Many data points suggest linking rules are highly regular. Regularity is seen both within verbs and across verbs. Not just Mary but all breakers are the subject and not object of break (John/the baby/the wind broke the vase/window/glass). Similarly, in English the object of a transitive change-of-state verb is systematically the entity that changes state while the subject effects that change (Mary broke/cleaned/opened the box). These intuitions generalize to novel words. If interpretable, The dax broke the blicket must mean that the dax is the breaker and the blicket is broken. Adults and children prefer an interpretation on which The bear pilked the horse means the bear did something to the horse, not vice versa (Marantz, 1982; see also Pinker, 1989). Moreover, these patterns are sufficiently regular across languages to suggest that some (Pinker, 1984) or all (Baker, 1988) linking rules are innate. However, there are numerous examples of apparent variation and exceptionality. An object moving from Mary’s possession to John’s can be described by Mary gave/lent/sent the package to John or John received/took/obtained the package from Mary. The same activity might be called Mary chasing John or John fleeing Mary. Many emotion verbs put the experiencer in subject position (John feared/hated/loved Mary), while others put the experiencer in object position (Mary frightened/angered/delighted John). Moreover, a relatively small number of languages appear to exhibit linking rules quite distinct from what is seen in languages like English (Dixon, 1994). In the present study, we investigate linking rule regularity and variation within and across two unrelated languages with respect to one such problematic case: psych verbs.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional Cues, Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621, as part of a multi-year project to replicate every published adult statistical word segmentation study. Despite a much larger sample than the original (101 subjects vs. 24), evidence of successful segmentation was weak and mixed, and none of the item or condition effects replicated. We consider whether this is more likely to be a failure of replication or a failure of generalization (e.g., to a different population).

I replicated Exp. 1 of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621, after a prior, largely unsuccessful replication attempt (Garcia et al., 2017, Replication of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, Exp. 1. PsyArXiv doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/QSYD2). The present replication corrected a randomization error in the prior replication and introduced attention checks to ensure that the participants were indeed attending to the stimuli. Despite this, and despite a much larger sample than the original (100 subjects vs. 24), evidence of successful segmentation was once again weak and mixed, and none of the item or condition effects replicated. I consider whether this is more likely to be a failure of replication or a failure of generalization (e.g., to a different population).

On the whole, children acquire frequent words earlier than less frequent words. However, there are other factors at play, such as an early "noun bias" (relative to input frequency, toddlers learn nouns faster than verbs) and a "content-word bias" (content words are acquired disproportionately to function words). This paper follows up reports of a puzzling phenomenon within verb-learning, where "experiencer-object" emotion verbs (A frightened/angered/delighted B) are lower frequency but learned earlier than "experiencer-subject" emotion verbs (A feared/hated/loved B). In addition to the possibility that the aforementioned results are a fluke or due to some confound, prior work has suggested several possible explanations: experiencer-object ("frighten-type") verbs have higher type frequency, encode a causal agent as the sentential subject, and perhaps describe a more salient perspective on the described event. In three experiments, we cast doubt on all three possible explanations. The first experiment replicates and extends the prior findings regarding emotion verbs, ruling out several possible confounds and concerns. The second and third experiments investigate acquisition of chase/flee verbs and give/get verbs, which reveal surprising findings that are not explained by the aforementioned hypotheses. We conclude that these findings indicate a significant hole in our theories of language learning, and that the path forward likely requires a great deal more empirical investigation of the order of acquisition of verbs.

Research on cognitive change typically focuses on early development or aging, and thus we have little knowledge of cognitive changes that might occur in adulthood. Taking advantage of large Web-based samples, we previously showed that both face learning ability and approximate number sense peak relatively late in adulthood (after age 30), whereas recognition memory for inverted faces and memory for names peak much earlier (Germine et al., 2011; Halberda et al., 2012). Here, we expand on these findings by examining cognitive change over the lifespan across a wide range of cognitive abilities. First, we present results from a systematic analysis of published data from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales and Wechsler Memory Scales showing that there is wide variation in the ages of peak performance on standardized IQ and memory tests. Second, we present findings from year-by-year analysis of large web samples on tests of processing speed, verbal and visual recognition memory, verbal and visual working memory, complex emotion perception, and crystallized verbal intelligence (sample sizes ranging from 3,000 to 10,000 for each test). Again, we find substantial heterogeneity in the peaks of different cognitive functions across the age range. While some cognitive abilities peak very early, declining after age 20 (e.g. processing speed), other cognitive abilities do not peak until around age 40 (e.g. complex emotion perception). Our findings also add to the growing list of cognitive functions that peak around age 30, including verbal and visual domains of working memory. Our data support the notion that changes in cognitive function over the lifespan are impacted by age-related change in multiple, dissociable factors. Finally, our data suggest that there is no age at which an adult has reached peak for all major cognitive functions. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013

The Neural Computation of Scalar Implicature Joshua K. Hartshorne (jkhartshorne@gmail.com) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Jesse Snedeker (snedeker@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Albert Kim (albert.kim@colorado.edu) Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado-Boulder, 594 UCB Boulder, CO 80309 USA Abstract Perhaps the most-researched implicature, illustrated in (2): What psychological and linguistic processes allow one to go beyond the literal meaning of a sentence and infer what was meant but not said (“reading between the lines”)? Theorists have differed as to whether these phenomena are driven by complex, online inference processes or by relatively rote rules. The present study uses ERP to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in scalar implicature (the inference that, e.g., “some” indicates “some but not all”), a test case that has been subject to considerable behavioral research but limited neuropsychological research. Our results challenge both rote-processing and rich-inference accounts. We provide the first ERP results showing that scalar implicature processing depends on context, challenging rote- processing theories of implicature. However, we also fail to find evidence of a processing cost associated with implicature processing, as predicted by many rich-inference accounts. These results point to a novel conceptualization of pragmatic processing in scalar implicature. test case is scalar (2) a. John ate some of the cookies. b. John did not eat all of the cookies. When we hear a sentence like (2a), we typically assume that (2b) is true as well. Although this inference is robust, it can be cancelled (3a), distinguishing it from semantic entailments, which cannot be cancelled (3b) (Hirschberg, 1991; Horn, 1972). (3) a. John ate some of the cookies. In fact, he ate all of them. b. *John ate some of the cookies. In fact, he ate none of them. On the classical view (Horn, 1972), scalar implicature requires rich online counter-factual reasoning: Listeners only infer (2b) from (2a) if they believe i) the speaker knows whether John ate all the cookies, ii) it is relevant whether John ate all the cookies, and iii) assuming (a-b) hold, the speaker would tell them that John ate all the cookies. This view has been questioned, originally by Levinson (2000), who argued that scalar implicatures are triggered automatically, prior even to compositional processing (i.e., processing language at the level of phrases or sentences). Much of the work addressing this theoretical dispute has been indirect, testing whether scalar implicatures are slow and computationally costly as a proxy for being rich and complex (Bott & Noveck, 2004; De Neys & Schaeken, 2007; Grodner, Klein, Carbary, & Tanenhaus, 2010; Huang & Snedeker, 2009). Results have been inconsistent and controversial. More problematically, the link between “slow and costly” and “rich and complex” can be disputed: Grodner and colleagues (2010) argue that scalar implicature is rich, complex, and fast; similarly nothing in principle forbids an automatic process from being slow. A more direct route is as follows: If scalar implicature is the result of a complex inference process, it should be possible to create contexts in which scalar implicatures are more or less likely to be calculated. If, on the other hand, scalar implicature is an automatic process, it should be relatively impervious to context. A handful of behavioral Keywords: language; pragmatics; ERP; scalar implicature Rich vs. Rote Pragmatics Understanding language appears to involve two broad but distinct kinds of processes: derivation of the semantic meaning (those things entailed to be true) and pragmatic inferences that go beyond this “literal” meaning (Bach, 1999; Grice, 1989; Morris, 1938). For example, given sentence (1), the fact that Gabe is the agent of the drinking event would typically be attributed to semantic decoding, while the inference that he is an inconsiderate lout who has annoyed the speaker would generally be construed as pragmatic. (1) Gabe drank all of the milk and put the carton back in the fridge. There is, however, considerable controversy about where semantics ends and pragmatics begins and about how to distinguish the representations and processes underlying each, as well as their interaction. One particularly contentious point is whether pragmatic inferences result from complex, rich reasoning processes (Grice, 1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1986) or from relatively rote, automatic, almost grammatical rules (Chierchia, Fox, & Spector, 2012; Levinson, 2000).

Search can be accomplished by categorizing each item into target and distracter categories and applying the single-object categorization procedure multiple times. To what extent is human visual search consistent with this notion? To answer this question, we applied two different categorical mappings on a single set of stimuli, and compared performance under these two mappings during search or categorization tasks. The stimuli were diamond-shaped objects missing one corner segment or a portion of one side segment. One categorical mapping (the component mapping), placed “corner-missing” objects into one category and “side-missing” objects into another category, while the other mapping (the orientation mapping) placed objects with either the top corner or a segment of the two top lines into the “top” category and objects with the bottom corner missing or a segment of the bottom lines missing into the “bottom” category. When searching for a target among multiple distracters, subjects responded most quickly when cued by the exact target, less quickly when told only which component category the target belonged to, and least quickly when told which orientation category the target belonged to. However, when categorizing single stimuli in the absence of distracters, subjects were significantly faster categorizing the stimuli according to the orientation mapping than the component mapping. Thus, the component cue appears to be more helpful than the orientation cue for guiding visual search, while the converse was true when a single stimulus was categorized. We conclude that human search performance is not consistent with the notion that search is accomplished by employing single-object categorization multiple times.

We report the first set of results in a multi-year project to replicate every adult statistical word segmentation study. We reported replications of six experiments. The purpose of these replications is both to assess the strength of the findings in the statistical learning literature but also to provide more accurate effect size estimates. In every instance, we were able to replicate successful learning. However, many theoretically important modulations of that learning failedto replicate. Moreover, learning success was generally much lower than in the original studies. In the General Discussion, we consider whether these differences are due to differences in subject populations, low power in the original studies, or some other factor. Regardless, these initial results suggest taking caution in relying on the originally reported findings.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Saffran, Johnson, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1999) Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults, as part of a multi-year effort to replicate every adult statistical word segmentation study. While we were able to replicate the finding of above- chance statistical segmentation of tone sequences, many of the other findings reported in the original paper did not replicate.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Frank, Goldwater, Griffiths, &amp;amp; Tenenbaum (2010): Modeling human performance in statistical word segmentation, Cognition, 117(2), 107-125, as part of a multi-year project to replicate eery published adult statistical word segmentation study. With some minor differences likely associated with a higher sample size, we largely replicate the main conclusion that longer sentence length increases word segmentation difficulty.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Frank, Goldwater, Griffiths, & Tenenbaum (2010): Modeling human performance in statistical word segmentation, Cognition, 117(2), 107-125, as part of a multi-year project to replicate eery published adult statistical word segmentation study. With some minor differences likely associated with a higher sample size, we largely replicate the main conclusion that longer sentence length increases word segmentation difficulty.

Verbs can only be used with a few specific arrangements of their arguments (syntactic frames).Most theorists note that verbs can be organized into a hierarchy of verb classes based on the frames they admit.Here we show that such a hierarchy is objectively well-supported by the patterns of verbs and frames in English, since a systematic hierarchical clustering algorithm converges on the same structure as the handcrafted taxonomy of VerbNet, a broad-coverage verb lexicon.We also show that the hierarchies capture meaningful psychological dimensions of generalization by predicting novel verb coercions by human participants.We discuss limitations of a simple hierarchical representation and suggest similar approaches for identifying the representations underpinning verb argument structure.

National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (5F32HD072748)

In this paper, we describe a replication of Experiment 2from a classic statistical word-segmentation paper by Saffran,Johnson, Aslin, and Newport (1999). This experimentwas part of a larger project to systematically replicateas many experiments involving statistical word learning inadults as possible.

We replicated Exp. 3 of Finn &amp;amp; Hudson Kam (2008) The curse of knowledge: First language knowledge impairs adult learners’ use of novel statistics for word segmentation, Cognition, 108, 477-499. This experiment was part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical word learning in adults as possible.

These are the results for an online replication of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621. This replication follows two online replications and an in-lab replication of the same experiment (Hartshorne 2017, Replication of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, Exp. 1. PsyArXiv doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/E5C64).

Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations – contrast and entailment – to reason about the meanings of ‘unknown’ number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown number, all unknown numbers begin with an existential meaning akin to some. In Experiment 1, we tested an alternative hypothesis, that because numbers belong to a scale of contrasting alternatives, children assign them a meaning distinct from some. In the “Don’t Give-a-Number task”, children were shown three kinds of fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries), and asked to not give either some or a number of one kind (e.g. Give everything, but not [some/five] bananas). While children tended to give zero bananas when asked to not give some, they gave positive amounts when asked to not give numbers. This suggests that contrast – plus knowledge of a number’s membership in a count list – enables children to differentiate the meanings of unknown number words from the meaning of some. Experiment 2 tested whether children’s interpretation of unknown numbers is further constrained by understanding numerical entailment relations – that if someone, e.g. has three, they thereby also have two, but if they do not have three, they also do not have four. On critical trials, children saw two characters with different quantities of fish, two apart (e.g. 2 vs. 4), and were asked about the number in-between – who either has or doesn’t have, e.g. three. Children picked the larger quantity for the affirmative, and the smaller for the negative prompts even when all the numbers were unknown, suggesting that they understood that, whatever three means, a larger quantity is more likely to contain that many, and a smaller quantity is more likely not to. We conclude by discussing how contrast and entailment could help children scaffold their exact meanings of unknown number words.

As psycholinguists, much of our time is spent steeped in abstraction, considering the nature of the mind. Every once in a while, we might raise our heads from our desks, gaze around, and wonder at the world around us and whether anyone might improve its state. Then it is back to binding principles, implicatures, and phonotactics. I believe in basic science, that knowledge is a per se good, and that more knowledge is more better. But I also believe that these goods will only accrue if there is a functioning society for them to accrue in – the prospect of which, as the threats of climate change, nuclear war, and genocide so frequently remind us, is by no means certain. Finally, I believe that my colleagues are possessed of a striking wealth of knowledge and ability that must, to be blunt, be good for something. Or perhaps not. Perhaps, in the face of societal threats, our skills are entirely extraneous, and our time is best spent knocking doors, calling representatives (if we are so fortunate as to have representatives), feeding refugees, comforting the afflicted, trading in our cars for bicycles, or heading to the battlefield. That is, I take it as a given that we should – all of us – be actively participating in constructing the world we wish to live in. Politics is not a mere spectator sport, in which we root and cheer and wear our favorite players’ jerseys. Society is what its members make it, and sitting on the sidelines affects the outcome just as much as getting out on the field. The question, then, is whether we should be contributing as psycholinguists. Hence this special issue. The goal was certainly not to win the war through psycholinguistics. We are still (mostly) basic scientists, and even research on application unfolds too slowly to be of immediate use for the present conflict. The question, then, is whether we have anything to contribute to mitigating the consequences of the war, speeding recovery, preparing for or preempting the next one, and generally contributing to building the world we wish to live in. That question is too broad to be answered definitively with a single special issue, particularly one compiled under less-than-ideal conditions. (Many of the authors are refugees. In some cases, final revisions had to be completed on only a couple hours of electricity per day.) Call it a pilot project. The contributors illustrate a number of ways psycholinguists might contribute. One set of contributions considers the role of language and communication in both fomenting and responding to conflict. Isacoff (2022) provides a theoretical overview of linguistic tools for promoting sectarian violence. Krylova-Grek (2022) provides a theoretically-motivated descriptive analysis of hate speech in Russian media. Matsuoka &amp; Matsuoka (2022) provide a detailed, line-by-line exegesis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Volodymyr Zelensky in his speech to the Japanese parliament, with a particular focus on mechanisms of building empathy and solidarity. Taking this a step further, both Ushchyna (2022) and Kovalchuk &amp; Litkovych (2022) document in real time the emergence of new words and other linguistic devices that are allowing Ukrainians to quickly convey to one another their shared experiences and values. (American audiences may find easy analogies to the emergence of societal buzzwords like “alternative facts” or “deplorables” or “red-pilled” – phrases that quickly expanded beyond their original usage to indirectly denote a cultural affiliation.) Another set of contributions focuses on the linguistic consequences of conflict. Yeter, Rabagliati, &amp; Özge (2022) draw on a broad literature to consider how the refugee experience interrupts children’s linguistic &amp; cognitive development. Labenko &amp; Skrypnyk (2022) complement this with a detailed linguistic analysis of sixty child refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chrabaszcz and colleagues (2022) present a more strictly applied study, addressing an even more direct consequence of displacement: many refugees land in countries where they do not know the language. The authors report on two crowd-sourced projects to provide virtual language instruction to refugees. A possible application for many of these lines of work is to monitor and track societal mood in real time. Karpina &amp; Chen (2022) use computational methods to analyze Ukraine-related statements on Twitter by four prominent Western politicians during the early course of the war. Zasiekin, Kuperman, Hlova, &amp; Zasiekina (2022) apply similar methods to analyzing mental state from Ukrainian war narratives posted on social media. The scope of both projects is limited by time pressure, power outages, and the like, but they join a larger literature in which researchers are increasingly using computational analysis of speech for applications ranging from monitoring hate speech to neuroclinical assessment (Lehr et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2022; Schmidt &amp; Wiegand, 2017). As of writing, the war in Ukraine continues. Psycholinguistics will not end it. I leave it to the readers of this issue to determine, after having considered the contributions herein, whether psycholinguists qua psycholinguists have a role to play in the broader societal context, and what, if any, your own role should be.

Developmental Evidence for a Canonical Syntax-Semantics Mapping for Verbs of Psychological States Amanda Pogue University of Toronto Joshua K. Hartshorne Harvard University Jesse Snedeker Harvard University Abstract: Psychological state verbs pose problems for theories of the syntax-semantics interface as they can appear with either the stimulus as the subject and the experiencer as the object (SS verbs, e.g. frighten), or vice versa (SO verbs, e.g. fear). In semantic bootstrapping proposals, one of these mapping is treated as an innate default. However theorists disagree about which is the canonical mapping (compare Pinker, 1984 with Grimshaw, 1990) and diary studies suggest the two emerge simultaneously in development (Bowerman, 1990). In Experiment 1, adults, 4- and 5-year-olds showed a trend towards better comprehension of SS-verbs (p=.06), with 4-year-olds performing at chance on SO-verbs. In a less taxing Experiment 2, 4-year-olds again exhibited superior comprehension of SS-verbs (pi.01), misanalyzing two SO-verbs as SS-verbs. Curiously, SO-verbs are more common in child-directed speech. We conclude that the SS mapping is acquired more easily and discuss implications for theories of argument realization.

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately run into significant difficulties – difficulties that illustrate the utility of abstractions. I conclude with a brief review of modern symbolic approaches that address the concerns Ambridge raises about abstractions.

As part of the Many Labs 5 project, we ran a replication of Van Dijk, Van Kleef, Steinel, &amp;amp; Van Beest’s (2008) study “A social functional approach to emotions in bargaining: When communicating anger pays and when it backfires,” which examined the effect of emotions in negotiations. Van Dijk et al. (2008) report that when the consequences of rejection were low, subjects offered fewer chips to angry bargaining partners when compared to happy partners. In the current study, we ran this replication under three protocols: the protocol used in the Replication Project (2015), a revised protocol, and an online protocol.

As part of an ongoing project to replicate major findings regarding statistical word segmentation in adults, we replicated Experiment 2 in Newport and Aslin (2004) ‘Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.’ This experiment compared learning of non-adjacent dependencies between syllables with learning of non-adjacent dependencies between segments, reporting below-chance success on the former and above-chance success on the latter. Despite a much larger sample size and more careful experimental controls, we failed to find clear evidence of learning in either condition.

As part of an ongoing project to replicate major findings regarding statistical word segmentation in adults, we replicated Experiment 1 in Newport and Aslin (2004) ‘Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.’ This experiment had reported at-chance performance on statistical word segmentation where words were defined by dependencies between non-adjacent syllables. We replicate this finding.

As part of an ongoing project to replicate major findings regarding statistical word segmentation in adults, we replicated Experiment 3 in Newport and Aslin (2004) ‘Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.’ This experiment had reported successful learning of non-adjacent dependencies between segments. We replicate this finding.

In this paper, we describe a replication of Experiment 1C from a statistical learning paper by Conway and Christiansen (2005). Although the original study compares statistical learning across tactile, visual, and auditory sequences, this paper will focus specifically on the auditory sequences. This experiment was part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical word learning in adults as possible.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Saffran, Newport, &amp;amp; Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621. This is the fifth replication of this experiment as part of a larger project investigating the reproducibility and replicability of adult statistical word segmentation studies. It differs from prior replications in using a different study pool (Prolific.ac vs. Amazon Mechanical Turk). However, the results were similar to other replications: we replicated the existence of statistical word segmentation, but did not replicate many of the observed moderators.

In this paper, we describe a replication of the auditory condition of Experiment 2 from a classic statistical learning paper by Conway &amp;amp; Christiansen (2005). Although the original study compares statistical learning across tactile, visual, and auditory sequences, this paper will focus specifically on the auditory sequences. This experiment was part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical learning in adults as possible.

We replicated Experiment 2a of Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, &amp;amp; Mehlor (2005) Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: The role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing, Psychological Science, 16(6), 451-459. This is part of a larger project investigating the reproducibility and replicability of adult statistical word segmentation studies. We replicated the study with both French-speaking subjects (as in the original) and English-speaking subjects. In both cases, we found a small but reliable effect, with subjects successfully tracking vowel transition probabilities. This is in contrast to the original paper, which found no such effect. This could be due to the much greater statistical power in the present replication.

Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker (2018, A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. *Cognition*, 117, 263-277) presented the first direct estimate of how the ability to learn the syntax of a second language changes with age. Recently, van der Slik, Schepens, Bongaerts, and van Hout (2021, Critical period claim revisited: Reanalysis of Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker (2018) suggests steady decline and learner-type differences. *Language* *Learning*) reported that Hartshorne et al's (2018) model provided different results when applied to subsets of the data (e.g., only monolinguals), which they take to be a refutation of the original results. While the questions raised by van der Slik et al (2021) are interesting and important, their conclusions are based on a misinterpretation of incorrectly performed analyses. After correcting these mistakes, their proposed analyses strongly confirm the original conclusions of Hartshorne and colleagues.

We replicated Experiment 2c of Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, &amp;amp; Mehler (2005) Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: The role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing, Psychological Science, 16(6), 451-459. This is part of a larger project investigating the reproducibility and replicability of adult statistical word segmentation studies. We replicated the study with both French-speaking subjects (as in the original) and English-speaking subjects. In both cases, we found a significant effect, with subjects successfully tracking vowel transition probabilities. This replicates the findings of the original paper, which reported similar results.

We replicated Experiment 2A in Newport and Aslin (2004) 'Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.' as part of an ongoing series of replications of auditory statistical learning studies with adults. The original study trained subjects on one of two languages defined by dependencies between non-adjacent syllables, finding below-chance performance in both cases. We only partly replicate this result, finding at-chance learning in both cases. While this is consistent with the original paper's claim that adults do not learn such languages, it may merely reflect very high uncertainty due to high degrees of variation across both subjects and items.