Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi

Multiple Time-Scales of Language Dynamics: An Example From Psycholinguistics

Linguistic forms are sustained by and, in turn, harness rich dynamics. Dynamical events, important for language, span timescales from milliseconds of brain activity to hundreds of milliseconds of individual cognitive processing, seconds and minutes of interaction, months and years of language acquisition, and hundreds of years of cultural language evolution. These events involve levels ranging from an individual brain, to dyads, to groups, to populations. This article aims to demonstrate that recognition of this complexity gives a different perspective on “grounding” of linguistic symbols. At the same time it attempts a preliminary systematization of the variety of dynamics that might be important. Finally, an example from psycholinguistic research is presented to show the necessity of including multiple levels and timescales in the explanation of interaction between language and other cognitive processes.

Language as a System of Replicable Constraints

For a psychologist interested in language processing, working in the beginning of the 1990s was not at all easy. On one hand, we had at our disposal methods of traditional psycholinguistics, with its information-processing models consisting of symbols, rules, parsers, and mental lexicons. Most of the body of knowledge about language processing gathered since mid-twentieth century was due to research motivated by this approach and its methodology. On the other hand, we were very much aware that the use of language involves time-dependent dynamical processes taking place both within and between individuals and involving physical stimuli, the nature of which, on the first sight, was not obviously symbolic.

Pooling the ground: understanding and coordination in collective sense making

Common ground is most often understood as the sum of mutually known beliefs, knowledge, and suppositions among the participants in a conversation. It explains why participants do not mention things that should be obvious to both. In some accounts of communication, reaching a mutual understanding, i.e., broadening the common ground, is posed as the ultimate goal of linguistic interactions. Yet, congruent with the more pragmatic views of linguistic behavior, in which language is treated as social coordination, understanding each other is not the purpose (or not the sole purpose) of linguistic interactions. This purpose is seen as at least twofold (e.g., Fusaroli et al., 2014): to maintain the systemic character of a conversing dyad and to organize it into a functional synergy in the face of tasks posed for a dyadic system as a whole. It seems that the notion of common ground is not sufficient to address the latter character of interaction. In situated communication, in which meaning is created in a distributed way in the very process of interaction, both common (sameness) and privileged (diversity) information must be pooled task-dependently across participants. In this paper, we analyze the definitions of common and privileged ground and propose a conceptual extension that may facilitate a theoretical account of agents that coordinate via linguistic communication. To illustrate the usefulness of this augmented framework, we apply it to one of the recurrent issues in psycholinguistic research, namely the problem of perspective-taking in dialog, and draw conclusions for the broader problem of audience design.

Information-sharing and aggregation models for interacting minds

Abstract We study mathematical models of the collaborative solving of a two-choice discrimination task. We estimate the difference between the shared performance for a group of n observers over a single person performance. Our paper is a theoretical extension of the recent work of Bahrami, Olsen, Latham, Roepstorff, and Frith (2010) from a dyad (a pair) to a group of n interacting minds. We analyze several models of communication, decision-making and hierarchical information-aggregation. The maximal slope of psychometric function is a convenient parameter characterizing performance. For every model we investigated, the group performance turns out to be a product of two numbers: a scaling factor depending of the group size and an average performance. The scaling factor is a power function of the group size (with the exponent ranging from 0 to 1), whereas the average is arithmetic mean, quadratic mean, or maximum of the individual slopes. Moreover, voting can be almost as efficient as more elaborate communication models, given the participants have similar individual performances.

Beyond mechanistic interaction: value-based constraints on meaning in language

According to situated, embodied, and distributed approaches to cognition, language is a crucial means for structuring social interactions. Recent approaches that emphasize this coordinative function treat language as a system of replicable constraints on individual and interactive dynamics. In this paper, we argue that the integration of the replicable-constraints approach to language with the ecological view on values allows for a deeper insight into processes of meaning creation in interaction. Such a synthesis of these frameworks draws attention to important sources of structuring interactions beyond the sheer efficiency of a collective system in its current task situation. Most importantly, the workings of linguistic constraints will be shown as embedded in more general fields of values, which are realized on multiple timescales. Because the ontogenetic timescale offers a convenient window into the emergence of linguistic constraints, we present illustrations of concrete mechanisms through which values may become embodied in language use in development.

Generic Framework for Simulation of Cognitive Systems: A Case Study of Color Category Boundaries

We present a generic model of a cognitive system, which is based on a population of communicating agents. Following the earlier models (Steels and Belpaeme, 2005) we give communication an important role in shaping the cognitive categories of individual agents. Yet in this paper we underscore the importance of other constraints on cognition: the structure of the environment, in which a system evolves and learns and the learning capacities of individual agents. Thus our agent-based model of cultural emergence of colour categories shows that boundaries might be seen as a product of agent’s communication in a given environment.We discuss the methodological issues related to real data characterization, as well as to the process of modeling the emergence of perceptual categories in human subjects.

Types of Integration in a Theory of Language

Abstract In the face of the complexity of language as an object of study, it becomes crucial for researchers who investigate its various facets to communicate and to understand each-others’ terminology, methods and results. The feasibility and utility of striving for the elegance of formal models of isolated aspects of the linguistic system (for example, set of generative rules in an individual’s head) are called into question: a theory of language needs to account for how it functions in multiple systems and on multiple time-scales. This short introduction to the special issue on Language as Social Coordination situates works in this issue on the map of collective effort to formulate such a theory. It is also a reflection on the form of a theory of language that could integrate this variety of data and results.

Performance of Language-Coordinated Collective Systems: A Study of Wine Recognition and Description.

Most of our perceptions of and engagements with the world are shaped by our immersion in social interactions, cultural traditions, tools and linguistic categories. In this study we experimentally investigate the impact of two types of language-based coordination on the recognition and description of complex sensory stimuli: that of red wine. Participants were asked to taste, remember and successively recognize samples of wines within a larger set in a two-by-two experimental design: (1) either individually or in pairs, and (2) with or without the support of a sommelier card—a cultural linguistic tool designed for wine description. Both effectiveness of recognition and the kinds of errors in the four conditions were analyzed. While our experimental manipulations did not impact recognition accuracy, bias-variance decomposition of error revealed non-trivial differences in how participants solved the task. Pairs generally displayed reduced bias and increased variance compared to individuals, however the variance dropped significantly when they used the sommelier card. The effect of sommelier card reducing the variance was observed only in pairs, individuals did not seem to benefit from the cultural linguistic tool. Analysis of descriptions generated with the aid of sommelier cards shows that pairs were more coherent and discriminative than individuals. The findings are discussed in terms of global properties and dynamics of collective systems when constrained by different types of cultural practices.

Language development from an ecological perspective: ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols

ABSTRACT In the embodied, situated, enacted and distributed approaches to cognition, the coordinative role of language comes to the fore. Language, with its symbolic properties, arises from a multimodal stream of interactive events and gradually gains power to constrain them in a functional and adaptive way. In this article, we attempt to integrate three approaches to information in cognitive systems to provide a theoretical background to the process of development of language as such a coordinator. Ecological psychology provides an explanation for how any behaviors or events become informative through the process of “tuning” to affordances that control individual and collective behavior. The dynamical approach helps to operationalize this control as a functional reduction of degrees of freedom of individual and collective systems. Cognitive semiotics provides a typology of constraints showing their interrelations: it proposes conditions under which informational controls that function as indices and icons may become symbolic, providing a qualitatively different form of constraint, which can be partially ungrounded from the ongoing stream of multimodal events. The article illustrates the proposed processes with examples from actual parent-infant interaction and points to ways of verifying them in a more quantitative way.

What Makes Us More Egocentric in Communication? The Role of Referent Features and Individual Differences

The perspective-adjustment model of language interpretation assumes an initial egocentric stage in comprehension that is only later adjusted to the interlocutors perspective. Moreover, substantial processing resources are involved in perspective-taking. However, many experiments in the perspective-adjustment framework do not control for visual salience and semantic typicality of referents. We conducted a referential task experiment focusing on salience and typicality as potential factors that may increase the cognitive costs of an interpretation. We additionally manipulated the interactive versus non-interactive nature of the task (with or without an interlocutor) to test the effects of perspective-taking on interpretation. Saliency and typicality of referents influenced the interpretation process when they were in conflict with the perspective-taking factor. Also, the interactive situations were more cognitively demanding than the non-interactive ones. These results are consistent with the constraint-based model that views interpretation as a probabilistic process of competition between constraints.