Related papers: Verbal Perception and the Word Length Effect

Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…

Language models are typically evaluated on their success at predicting the distribution of specific words in specific contexts. Yet linguistic knowledge also encodes relationships between contexts, allowing inferences between word…

Synchronization of finite spike sequences is the way two brain regions compare their content and extract the most suitable sequence. This is the core of the linguistic comparison between a word and a previous one retrieved by memory.…

An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…

Word similarities affect language acquisition and use in a multi-relational way barely accounted for in the literature. We propose a multiplex network representation of this mental lexicon of word similarities as a natural framework for…

People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to the basic-level in a hierarchical taxonomy -- a cognitively salient category such as "dog" -- with the degree of generalization depending on the number and type of exemplars. Recently,…

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific…

The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…

Similarity is a core notion that is used in psychology and two branches of linguistics: theoretical and computational. The similarity datasets that come from the two fields differ in design: psychological datasets are focused around a…

Word embeddings are a fixed, distributional representation of the context of words in a corpus learned from word co-occurrences. While word embeddings have proven to have many practical uses in natural language processing tasks, they…

Class-based language models (LMs) have been long devised to address context sparsity in $n$-gram LMs. In this study, we revisit this approach in the context of neural LMs. We hypothesize that class-based prediction leads to an implicit…

It is recently demonstrated that cortical activity can track the time courses of phrases and sentences during speech listening. Here, we propose a plausible neural processing framework to explain this phenomenon. It is argued that the brain…

Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…

Language models must capture statistical dependencies between words at timescales ranging from very short to very long. Earlier work has demonstrated that dependencies in natural language tend to decay with distance between words according…

Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and…

Language decoding studies have identified word representations which can be used to predict brain activity in response to novel words and sentences (Anderson et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2018). The unspoken assumption of these studies is…

The statistical study of human memory requires large-scale experiments, involving many stimuli conditions and test subjects. While this approach has proven to be quite fruitful for meaningless material such as random lists of words,…

Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the…

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

While word embeddings are currently predominant for natural language processing, most of existing models learn them solely from their contexts. However, these context-based word embeddings are limited since not all words' meaning can be…