Linguistically Modulated Perception and Cognition: The Label-Feedback Hypothesis

How does language impact cognition and perception? A growing number of studies show that language, and specifically the practice of labeling, can exert extremely rapid and pervasive effects on putatively non-verbal processes such as categorization, visual discrimination, and even simply detecting the presence of a stimulus. Progress on the empirical front, however, has not been accompanied by progress in understanding the mechanisms by which language affects these processes. One puzzle is how effects of language can be both deep, in the sense of affecting even basic visual processes, and yet vulnerable to manipulations such as verbal interference, which can sometimes nullify effects of language. In this paper, I review some of the evidence for effects of language on cognition and perception, showing that performance on tasks that have been presumed to be non-verbal is rapidly modulated by language. I argue that a clearer understanding of the relationship between language and cognition can be achieved by rejecting the distinction between verbal and non-verbal representations and by adopting a framework in which language modulates ongoing cognitive and perceptual processing in a flexible and task-dependent manner

Is perception cognitively penetrable? A philosophically satisfying and empirically testable reframing

The question of whether perception can be penetrated by cognition is in the limelight again. The reason this question keeps coming up is that there is so much at stake: Is it possible to have theory-neutral observation? Is it possible to study perception without recourse to expectations, context, and beliefs? What are the boundaries between perception, memory, and inference (and do they even exist)? Are findings from neuroscience that paint a picture of perception as an inherently bidirectional and interactive process relevant for understanding the relationship between cognition and perception? We have assembled a group of philosophers and psychologists who have been considering the thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability in light of these questions (Abdel Rahman & Sommer, 2008; Goldstone, Landy, & Brunel, 2011; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, & Swingley, 2010; Macpherson, 2012; Stokes, 2011). Rather than rehashing previous arguments which appear, in retrospect, to have been somewhat ill-posed (Pylyshyn, 1999), this symposium will present a thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability that is at once philosophically satisfying, empirically testable, and relevant to the questions that cognitive scientists find most interesting

Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely align. By contrast, if shared word meanings are a product of shared culture, history and geography, they may differ between languages in substantial but predictable ways. Here, we analysed the semantic neighbourhoods of 1,010 meanings in 41 languages. The most-aligned words were from semantic domains with high internal structure (number, quantity and kinship). Words denoting natural kinds, common actions and artefacts aligned much less well. Languages that are more geographically proximate, more historically related and/or spoken by more-similar cultures had more aligned word meanings. These results provide evidence that the meanings of common words vary in ways that reflect the culture, history and geography of their users

Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages

People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners

Abstract The innovation of iconic gestures is essential to establishing the vocabularies of signed languages, but might iconicity also play a role in the origin of spoken words? Can people create novel vocalizations that are comprehensible to naïve listeners without prior convention? We launched a contest in which participants submitted non-linguistic vocalizations for 30 meanings spanning actions, humans, animals, inanimate objects, properties, quantifiers and demonstratives. The winner was determined by the ability of naïve listeners to infer the meanings of the vocalizations. We report a series of experiments and analyses that evaluated the vocalizations for: (1) comprehensibility to naïve listeners; (2) the degree to which they were iconic; (3) agreement between producers and listeners in iconicity; and (4) whether iconicity helps listeners learn the vocalizations as category labels. The results show contestants were able to create successful iconic vocalizations for most of the meanings, which were largely comprehensible to naïve listeners, and easier to learn as category labels. These findings demonstrate how iconic vocalizations can enable interlocutors to establish understanding in the absence of conventions. They suggest that, prior to the advent of full-blown spoken languages, people could have used iconic vocalizations to ground a spoken vocabulary with considerable semantic breadth

A Data-driven Approach to the Semantics of Iconicity in American Sign Language and English

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

People have long pondered the evolution of language and the origin of words. Here, we investigate how conventional spoken words might emerge from imitations of environmental sounds. Does the repeated imitation of an environmental sound gradually give rise to more word-like forms? In what ways do these forms resemble the original sounds that motivated them (i.e. exhibit iconicity)? Participants played a version of the children's game ‘Telephone’. The first generation of participants imitated recognizable environmental sounds (e.g. glass breaking, water splashing). Subsequent generations imitated the previous generation of imitations for a maximum of eight generations. The results showed that the imitations became more stable and word-like, and later imitations were easier to learn as category labels. At the same time, even after eight generations, both spoken imitations and their written transcriptions could be matched above chance to the category of environmental sound that motivated them. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while continuing to retain a resemblance to the original sound that motivated them, and speak to the possible role of human vocal imitation in explaining the origins of at least some spoken words.</jats:p

Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form-to-meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development, and communication: systematicity facilitates category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help to explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure