Mahesh Srinivasan

The long and the short of it: On the nature and origin of functional overlap between representations of space and time

When we describe time, we often use the language of space (The movie was long; The deadline is approaching). Experiments 1-3 asked whether-as patterns in language suggest-a structural similarity between representations of spatial length and temporal duration is easier to access than one between length and other dimensions of experience, such as loudness. Adult participants were shown pairings of lines of different length with tones of different duration (Experiment 1) or tones of different loudness (Experiment 2). The length of the lines and duration or loudness of the tones was either positively or negatively correlated. Participants were better able to bind particular lengths and durations when they were positively correlated than when they were not, a pattern not observed for pairings of lengths and tone amplitudes, even after controlling for the presence of visual cues to duration in Experiment 1 (Experiment 3). This suggests that representations of length and duration may functionally overlap to a greater extent than representations of length and loudness. Experiments 4 and 5 asked whether experience with and mastery of words like long and short-which can flexibly refer to both space and time-itself creates this privileged relationship. Nine-month-old infants, like adults, were better able to bind representations of particular lengths and durations when these were positively correlated (Experiment 4), and failed to show this pattern for pairings of lengths and tone amplitudes (Experiment 5). We conclude that the functional overlap between representations of length and duration does not result from a metaphoric construction processes mediated by learning to flexibly use words such as long and short. We suggest instead that it may reflect an evolutionary recycling of spatial representations for more general purposes.

Even Abstract Motion Influences the Understanding of Time

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? Three experiments investigated how thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience.

Religion insulates ingroup evaluations : the development of intergroup attitudes in India

Research on the development of implicit intergroup attitudes has placed heavy emphasis on race, leaving open how social categories that are prominent in other cultures might operate. We investigate two of Indias primary means of social distinction, caste and religion, and explore the development of implicit and explicit attitudes towards these groups in minority-status Muslim children and majority-status Hindu children, the latter drawn from various positions in the Hindu caste system. Results from two tests of implicit attitudes find that caste attitudes parallel previous findings for race: higher-caste children as well as lower-caste children have robust high-caste preferences. However, results for religion were strikingly different: both lower-status Muslim children and higher-status Hindu children show strong implicit ingroup preferences. We suggest that religion may play a protective role in insulating children from the internalization of stigma.

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.

Polysemy and the Taxonomic Constraint: Children's Representation of Words That Label Multiple Kinds.

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a taxonomic assumption and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds—for example, chicken, which labels an animal and its meat—as separate and unrelated words that each encode a single kind. Our studies provide evidence against this account: we show that four- and five-year-old children spontaneously expect that a word that has labeled one meaning of a familiar polysemous word will also label its other, taxonomically different meaning. Further, we show that childrens taxonomic flexibility is importantly constrained—children do not expect a word to label thematically-related meanings (e.g., chicken and egg), or the unrelated meanings of homophones (e.g., bat[animal] and bat[baseball]). We argue that although children are initially guided by the taxonomic constraint when pairing word forms with meanings, they nonetheless relate the taxonomically-different meanings of polysemous words within lexical structure. Thus, for even young children, a single word can label multiple kinds.

Encoding individuals in language using syntax, words, and pragmatic inference

How does linguistic structure relate to how we construe reality? In many languages, countable individuals like objects are typically labeled by count nouns (e.g., two rabbits, every truck, etc.), while unindividuated masses like substances are typically labeled by mass nouns (e.g., much mud, barrel of oil, etc.) (Quine WVO. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1960). These facts have led researchers to propose that learning mass-count syntax affects how speakers perceive objects and substances or alternatively that an understanding of this distinction-or one between individuals and nonindividuals-scaffolds the acquisition of mass and count nouns. Here, we evaluate these ideas and describe how recent developments in the literature have fundamentally changed our understanding of the mass-count distinction and how it relates to individuation. Across three sections, we show that a simple distinction between countable individuals and nonindividuals cannot provide a foundation for the mass-count distinction (e.g., because many mass nouns like furniture and luggage can denote individuals). Furthermore, we show that mass-count syntax does not shape whether items are construed as individuals or not, but instead allows speakers to select from a set of universally available meanings (e.g., because speakers of all languages quantify objects and substances similarly). We argue that a complete understanding of how mass-count syntax encodes reality requires understanding how different aspects of language-syntax, lexical roots, word meanings, and pragmatic inference-interact to encode abstract, countable individuals. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:341-353. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1396 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses

Significance How do words develop new senses? Unlike changes in sound or grammar where there are rich formal characterizations, semantic change is poorly understood. Changes in meaning are often considered intractable, with sparse attempts at formalizing and evaluating the principles against historical data at scale. We present a data-enriched formal approach that explores the time-varying lexicon. Motivated by prominent work in cognitive science and linguistics, we develop computational algorithms that predict the historical order in which the senses of a word have emerged, and we test these predictions against records of English over the past millennium. Our findings suggest that word senses emerge in ways that minimize cognitive costs, providing an efficient mechanism for expressing new ideas via a compact lexicon. Human language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite set of ideas. A key result of this tension is that words acquire novel senses over time. However, the cognitive processes that underlie the historical emergence of new word senses are poorly understood. Here, we present a computational framework that formalizes competing views of how new senses of a word might emerge by attaching to existing senses of the word. We test the ability of the models to predict the temporal order in which the senses of individual words have emerged, using an historical lexicon of English spanning the past millennium. Our findings suggest that word senses emerge in predictable ways, following an historical path that reflects cognitive efficiency, predominantly through a process of nearest-neighbor chaining. Our work contributes a formal account of the generative processes that underlie lexical evolution.

Children's use of polysemy to structure new word meanings

It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that—because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., “glass” can label a material and drinking vessel)—children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across 4 experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic—the shape bias—when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object (“a gup”) has previously been used to label the material composing that object (“some gup”), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word’s meanings are related, not when they are arbitrarily paired (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that children can exploit cues from polysemy to infer how new word meanings should be extended, suggesting that polysemy may facilitate word learning and invite children to construe categories in new ways.

Spatial metaphor and the development of cross-domain mappings in early childhood.

Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time (long sound) and pitch (high sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the ability to associate space with other domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task. We probed cross-domain relations that are expressed in English metaphors for time and pitch (length-time and height-pitch) as well as relations that are unconventional in English but expressed in other languages (size-time and thickness-pitch). Participants were tested with a perceptual matching task, in which they matched between spatial stimuli and sounds of different durations or pitches, and a linguistic matching task, in which they matched between a label denoting a spatial attribute, duration, or pitch and a picture or sound representing another dimension. Contrary to previous claims that experience with linguistic metaphors is necessary for children to make cross-domain mappings, children performed above chance for both familiar and unfamiliar relations in both tasks, as did adults. Children’s performance was also better when a label was provided for one of the dimensions, but only when making length-time, size-time, and height-pitch mappings (not thickness-pitch mappings). These findings suggest that although experience with metaphorical language is not necessary to make cross-domain mappings, labels can promote these mappings, both when they have familiar metaphorical uses (e.g., English long denotes both length and duration) and when they describe dimensions that share a common ordinal reference frame (e.g., size and duration but not thickness and pitch).

Reasoning About the Scope of Religious Norms: Evidence From Hindu and Muslim Children in India

Conflicts arise when members of one religion apply their norms to members of another religion. Two studies explored how one hundred 9- to 15-year-old Hindu and Muslim children from India reason about the scope of religious norms. Both Hindus and Muslims from a diverse Hindu-Muslim school (Study 1) and Hindus from a homogeneous Hindu school (Study 2) more often judged it wrong for Hindus to violate Hindu norms, compared to Muslim norms, and said the opposite for Muslims. In contrast, children judged it wrong for both Hindus and Muslims to harm others. Thus, even in a setting marred by religious conflict, children can restrict the scope of a religions norms to members of that religion, providing a basis for peaceful coexistence.