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1. Amodal phonology

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000298  

   Berent, Iris; Bat-El, Outi; Brentari, Diane; Andan, Qatherine; Vakinin-Nusbaum, Vered (January 2020, Journal of linguistics)

   Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g., panana, generally, ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract. 

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2. Pragmatics and social meaning: Understanding under-informativeness in native and non-native speakers

   Fairchild, Sarah; Mathis, Ariel; Papafragou, Anna (December 2019, International journal of cognitive science engineering and technology)

   Foreign-accented non-native speakers sometimes face negative biases compared to native speakers. Here we report an advantage in how comprehenders process the speech of non-native compared to native speakers. In a series of four experiments, we find that under-informative sentences are interpreted differently when attributed to non-native compared to native speakers. Specifically, under-informativeness is more likely to be attributed to inability (rather than unwillingness) to say more in non-native as compared to native speakers. This asymmetry has implications for learning: under-informative teachers are more likely to be given a second chance in case they are non-native speakers of the language (presumably because their prior under-informativeness is less likely to be intentional). Our results suggest strong effects of non-native speech on social-pragmatic inferences. Because these effects emerge for written stimuli, they support theories that stress the role of expectations on non-native comprehension, even in the absence of experience with foreign accents. Finally, our data bear on pragmatic theories of how speaker identity affects language comprehension and show how such theories offer an integrated framework for explaining how non-native language can lead to (sometimes unexpected) social meanings. 

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3. Towards Knowledge Acquisition of Metadata on AI Progress

   Chen, Zhiyul Trabelsi; Davison, Brian D; Heflin, Jeff (October 2020, CEUR workshop proceedings)

   Taylor, Kerry; Gonçalves, Rafael; Lecue, Freddy; Yan, Jun (Ed.)

   We propose an ontology to help AI researchers keep track of the scholarly progress of AI related tasks such as natural language processing and computer vision. We first define the core entities and relations in the proposed Machine Learning Progress Ontology (MLPO). Then we describe how to use the techniques in natural language processing to construct a Machine Learning Progress Knowledge Base (MPKB) that can support various downstream tasks. 

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4. Understanding Cross-lingual Pragmatic Misunderstandings in Email Communication

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512976  

   Lim, Hajin; Cosley, Dan; Fussell, Susan R. (January 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on humancomputer interaction)

   Communication tools such as email facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different languages, who use two primary strategies—English as a common language and machine translation (MT) tools—to help them overcome language barriers. However, each of these communication strategies creates its own challenges for cross-lingual communication. In this paper, we compare how people’s interpretations of an email sender’s social intention, and their evaluation of the email and the senders, differ when using a common language versus MT in email communication. We conducted an online experiment in which monolingual native English speakers read and rated request emails written by native English speakers, emails written by bilingual Chinese speakers in English, and emails written in Chinese then machine-translated into English. We found that participants interpreted the social intentions of the email sender less accurately for machine-translated emails than for emails written by non-native speakers in English. Participants also rated the senders and emails less positively overall for machine-translated emails compared to emails written by non-native speakers in English. Based on these findings, we suggest design possibilities that could better aid multilingual communication. 

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5. Where word and world meet: Language and vision share an abstract representation of symmetry

   Hafri, Alon; Gleitman, Lila R.; Landau, Barbara; Trueswell, John C. (January 2022, Journal of experimental psychology)

   Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature, in logic and mathematics, and in perception, language, and thought. Although humans are exquisitely sensitive to visual symmetry (e.g., of a butterfly), symmetry in natural language goes beyond visuospatial properties: many words point to abstract concepts with symmetrical content (e.g., equal, marry). For example, if Mark marries Bill, then Bill marries Mark. In both cases (vision and language), symmetry may be formally characterized as invariance under transformation. Is this a coincidence, or is there some deeper psychological resemblance? Here we asked whether representations of symmetry correspond across language and vision. To do so, we developed a novel cross-modal matching paradigm. On each trial, participants observed a visual stimulus (either symmetrical or non-symmetrical) and had to choose between a symmetrical and non-symmetrical English predicate unrelated to the stimulus (e.g., “negotiate” vs. “propose”). In a first study with visual events (symmetrical collision or asymmetrical launch), participants reliably chose the predicate matching the event’s symmetry. A second study showed that this “language-vision correspondence” generalized to objects, and was weakened when the stimuli’s binary nature was made less apparent (i.e., for one object, rather than two inward-facing objects). A final study showed the same effect when nonsigners guessed English translations of signs from American Sign Language, which expresses many symmetrical concepts spatially. Taken together, our findings support the existence of an abstract representation of symmetry which humans access via both perceptual and linguistic means. More broadly, this work sheds light on the rich, structured nature of the language-cognition interface. 

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