Experimental evidence for scale-induced category convergence across populations

Individuals vary widely in how they categorize novel and ambiguous phenomena. This individual variation has led influential theories in cognitive and social science to suggest that communication in large social groups introduces path dependence in category formation, which is expected to lead separate populations toward divergent cultural trajectories. Yet, anthropological data indicates that large, independent societies consistently arrive at highly similar category systems across a range of topics. How is it possible for diverse populations, consisting of individuals with significant variation in how they categorize the world, to independently construct similar category systems? Here, we investigate this puzzle experimentally by creating an online "Grouping Game" in which we observe how people in small and large populations collaboratively construct category systems for a continuum of ambiguous stimuli. We find that solitary individuals and small groups produce highly divergent category systems; however, across independent trials with unique participants, large populations consistently converge on highly similar category systems. A formal model of critical mass dynamics in social networks accurately predicts this process of scale-induced category convergence. Our findings show how large communication networks can filter lexical diversity among individuals to produce replicable society-level patterns, yielding unexpected implications for cultural evolution

The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading

Readers? eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character?s positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word?s constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification

Compositionality and Concepts

In this chapter I aim to explain how psychology understands concepts, and why there is a need for semantic theory to take on the challenge of psychological data. All of the contributors to this volume are (presumably) in the business of trying to understand and explain how language has meaning, and the primary source of evidence for this has to be our intuitions of what things mean. Furthermore, if my semantic intuitions (as a theorist) are out of kilter with those of the common language user, then it is my theory which should be called into question and not the lay intuition. This chapter describes a range of results from my research program over the last 30 years, some old and some new, with the aim of giving a general account of using Prototype Theory as a way to explain semantic intuitions

Object naming and later lexical development

Onderzoeksgroep Hogere cognitie en individuele verschillen. Afdeling Psychodiagnostiek en psychologische begeleiding.status: publishe

Development of cross-language lexical influence

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Bilinguals are often not fully monolingual-like in either language. With respect to the lexicon, recent research demonstrates that their naming patterns for common household objects tend to converge on a common pattern for the two languages. The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of naming of common household objects in Dutch/French bilingual and monolingual children. First, we investigated whether bilingual word diversity for a set of household objects is limited by the demands of learning two languages. We found that children lag behind monolingual controls in terms of vocabulary at young ages, but that they catch up later, ending with as diverse a set of names in each language as the monolinguals. Second, we investigated how the convergence in the adult bilingual lexicon manifests itself over the course of development. We found that naming patterns converge with age following a similarity-driven strategy, a pattern also seen for the monolinguals. However, language-specific exceptions to the similarity principle are acknowledged from age 10 onward by monolinguals, but only from age 14 onward in bilinguals. At all ages, bilinguals show more convergence than monolinguals, and the difference is largest for adults. Together our results indicate that acquisition of naming patterns by bilinguals starts off more or less following the early stages of monolinguals, with separate naming patterns in the two languages, but convergence dominates the later developmental path to a larger extent for bilinguals than for monolinguals.status: publishe