Gavagai Is as Gavagai Does: Learning Nouns and Verbs From Cross‐Situational Statistics

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross‐situational learning studies have shown that word‐object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category‐level as well as individual word‐level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.     

Examining the Relationship Between Female Parents with Low Perceived Control and Adolescent Child Stress

Adolescence is a stressful time for many children. Changes in their environment or changes in social situations are some typical stressors that an adolescent child might encounter. Interactions with parents can also be stressors for a child. Previous research has shown that a risk factor for a parent using harsh parenting techniques is perceived control. Parents who have low perceived control are at a higher risk to engage in physical parenting techniques or child abuse. This study included 198 middle school students and their female parent or guardian pairs (296 total participants), with the adolescent participants ranging in age from 10- to 14-years-old. The adult participants were evaluated for their level of perceived control and the adolescent participants were evaluated for their level of perceived stress. Parents who perceived themselves as having a low amount of control over their child’s behavior (low ACF), were linked with their child having a high level of perceived stress. This effect was found only for the 14-year-old participants. Implications of results and areas of further research are suggested. It is possible that as a child gets older and enters puberty, the parent of the child feels as if they are losing control over their child and, as a result, resort to more forceful parenting techniques to regain control.     

Influence of dorsolateral periaqueductal grey (dlPAG) lesions on contextual conditioning with massed and distributed shock

Three experiments investigated the conditions under which electrolytic lesions of the dorsolateral periaqueductal grey (dlPAG) facilitate conditioned defensive freezing in the rat ( Rattus norvegicus ). Experiment 1 found that dlPAG lesions placed before context-shock pairings facilitated conditioned defensive freezing with massed but not distributed shock. No such effect was found in Experiment 2, when the lesions were placed after context-shock pairings. Experiment 3 found that dlPAG lesions facilitated subsequent conditioning with massed but not a single shock. In addition, no differences in sensitivity to thermal or shock pain were evident in lesioned and unlesioned rats. Taken together, these results are consistent with the suggestion that dlPAG activation interferes with the processing of contextual cues during association formation.     

Speaking two “Languages” in America: A semantic space analysis of how presidential candidates and their supporters represent abstract political concepts differently

In this article we report a computational semantic analysis of the presidential candidates’ speeches in the two major political parties in the USA. In Study One, we modeled the political semantic spaces as a function of party, candidate, and time of election, and findings revealed patterns of differences in the semantic representation of key political concepts and the changing landscapes in which the presidential candidates align or misalign with their parties in terms of the representation and organization of politically central concepts. Our models further showed that the 2016 US presidential nominees had distinct conceptual representations from those of previous election years, and these patterns did not necessarily align with their respective political parties’ average representation of the key political concepts. In Study Two, structural equation modeling demonstrated that reported political engagement among voters differentially predicted reported likelihoods of voting for Clinton versus Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Study Three indicated that Republicans and Democrats showed distinct, systematic word association patterns for the same concepts/terms, which could be reliably distinguished using machine learning methods. These studies suggest that given an individual’s political beliefs, we can make reliable predictions about how they understand words, and given how an individual understands those same words, we can also predict an individual’s political beliefs. Our study provides a bridge between semantic space models and abstract representations of political concepts on the one hand, and the representations of political concepts and citizens’ voting behavior on the other.     

The K-factor: Individual differences in life history strategy

Until recently, variations in life history strategy were studied exclusively at the species level. Although this domain of study has been extended to examine systematic differences in life history strategy among various human ethnic groupings, more recent evolutionary theories of human development and related behavioral genetic work imply substantial within-group individual variation in life history strategy. We constructed a latent variable model identifying a single common factor, denoted as K, which underlies a variety of otherwise disparate life history parameters. This “K-Factor” loaded 0.36 on childhood attachment to the biological father, −0.36 on childhood attachment to any non-biological father figure, 0.38 on adult romantic partner attachment, −0.51 on mating effort, −0.58 on Machiavellianism, and −0.41 on risk propensity. The bivariate correlations of the K-factor with higher-order personality factors were statistically significant, −0.24 with “Big Neuroticism” and −0.67 with “Big Psychoticism”, and approached significance, correlating 0.12, with “Big Extraversion”. The K-factor appears to be an underappreciated individual difference variable of major importance to human development.     

The arbitrariness of the sign: learning advantages from the structure of the vocabulary

Recent research has demonstrated that systematic mappings between phonological word forms and their meanings can facilitate language learning (e.g., in the form of sound symbolism or cues to grammatical categories). Yet, paradoxically from a learning viewpoint, most words have an arbitrary form-meaning mapping. We hypothesized that this paradox may reflect a division of labor between 2 different language learning functions: arbitrariness facilitates learning specific word meanings and systematicity facilitates learning to group words into categories. In a series of computational investigations and artificial language learning studies, we varied the extent to which the language was arbitrary or systematic. For both the simulations and the behavioral studies, we found that the optimal structure of the vocabulary for learning incorporated this division of labor. Corpus analyses of English and French indicate that these predicted patterns are also found in natural languages.     

What exactly interacts with spelling-sound consistency in word naming?

Word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability were combined with spelling-sound consistency, and their effects on word naming were examined. Frequency and AoA interacted with consistency (Experiments 1 and 2). Imageability did not (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 2 of E. Strain, K. E. Patterson, and M. S. Seidenberg's (1995) study and obtained the same apparent effect of imageability on naming. That effect disappeared when AoA was entered as a covariate. An explanation of the interactions of consistency with frequency and AoA is offered in terms of the properties of adaptive connectionist networks given gradual and cumulative training.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in the split-fovea model of semantic processing

We report a series of neural network models of semantic processing of single English words in the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. We implement the foveal splitting of the visual field and assess the influence of this splitting on a mapping from orthography to semantic representations in single word reading. The models were trained on English four-letter words, presented according to their frequency in all positions encountered during normal reading. The architecture of the model interacted with the training set to produce processing asymmetries comparable to those found in behavioral studies. First, the cueing effects of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words were different for words presented to the left or to the right of the input layer. Second, priming effects of groups of related words were stronger in the left input than the right input of the model. These effects were caused by coarser-coding in the right half compared with the left half of the model, an emergent effect of the split model interacting with informational asymmetries in the left and right parts of words in the lexicon of English. Some or all of the behavioral data for reading single words in English may have a similar origin.