Kategori: Oral presentations

Mads Nielsen, University of Copenhagen

Rikke Vang Christensen, University of Copenhagen

Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, University of Copenhagen

 

Taking narratives as a linguistic reflection of parts of mental organisation, this study investigates how 10-to-14-year-old Danish-speaking children with typical development (TD; n = 30), autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 27) and developmental language disorders (DLD; n = 12) report events in two short animated videos, both of which consist of simple geometrical figures moving around. One of the videos is designed to elicit descriptions of physical events, e.g. ‘orbiting’ and ‘rotating’ (Klin & Jones 2006), the other is designed to elicit descriptions of social events, e.g. ‘fighting’ and ‘chasing’ (Heider & Simmel 1944). All of the children are matched on age, IQ and memory, and the TD and ASD children also on vocabulary and grammar comprehension.

First, we examined how likely the children are at attributing intentionality to the geometrical figures in the videos, e.g. do they describe them as bumping around or as fighting? Previous studies show divergent results (e.g. Bowler & Thommen 2000, Castelli et al. 2002, White et al. 2011), probably in part because their linguistic data are coded according to somewhat impressionistic rather than exact semantic criteria. We argue that a systematic semantic analysis of predicates is a more reliable measure of linguistic attribution of intentionality. Our comparison of children with TD and ASD shows that there is no difference in how likely they are at attributing intentionality linguistically in either task.

Second, we compared the stories in the three groups of children in terms of how much relevant information they include. We rated the children’s narratives on an index based on adults’ stories about the same videos. Preliminary analyses suggest that there are significant differences between the groups on both narrative tasks. Specifically, TD children appear to include more relevant events than the two diagnostic groups, no matter whether the story highlights social or physical relations between ‘characters’. Taken together with the findings on intentionality, it appears that the more idiosyncratic narratives by the children with ASD are not due to difficulties with detecting intentionality. Further analyses will be made to see whether language difficulties, social difficulties, or difficulties with integrating information may explain the different relevance ratings of the children’s narratives.

We believe that this study through the use of precise semantic analysis and methodological triangulation brings us a small but important step closer to unravel some of the complexity of the difficulties that children with ASD or DLD experience.

 

References

Bowler, Dermot M. & Evelyne Thommen. 2000. Attribution of mechanical and social causality to animated displays by children with autism. Autism 4(2), 147-171. doi:10.1177/1362361300004002004.

Castelli, Fulvia, Chris D. Frith, Francesca G. Happé & Uta Frith. 2002. Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain 125, 1839-1849. doi:10.1093/brain/awf189.

Heider, Fritz & Marianne Simmel. 1944. An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology 57(2), 243-259. doi:10.2307/1416950.

Klin, Ami & Jones Warren. 2006. Attributing social and physical meaning to ambigious visual displays in individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Brain and Cognition 61, 40-53. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2005.12.016.

White, Sarah, Devorah Coniston, Rosannagh Rogers & Uta Frith. 2011. Developing the Frith-Happé animations: A quick and objective test of theory of mind for adults with autism. Autism Research 4, 149-154. doi:10.1002/aur.174.

Urpo Nikanne, Åbo Akademi University

Geda Paulsen, Estonian Language Institute / Uppsala University

In our paper, we will discuss the language use in the government programs in Estonia and Finland (in Estonia: “Governance Actions Program” and in Finland “Government Programme”).  In Finland, all the government programs can be found on the government website (https://vnk.fi/) and in Estonia they are published on the Estonian government website (https://www.valitsus.ee/).

Government program text have several functions: it is (i) a strategy that defines and motivates the goals of the government and the means achieving these goals, (ii) an agreement between the political parties in the government coalition, and (iii) information to the parliament and the citizens of the plans of the government.

We will focus on the third function, as it is crucial to open decision making, and concentrate on the programs of the current governments: Sanna Marin’s government in Finland (10 December 2019) and Kaja Kallas’ government in Estonia (25 January 2021).

As strategy texts, government programs are supposed to describe the current situation, i.e., the starting point when the government starts its work, the goals that the government is aiming at, and the means that the government will use for achieving its goals. Basically, that is all there should be. Yet, the texts often include confusing parts whose only function is to appeal to the readers’ emotions. We call those parts in classical rhetorical terms pathos. E.g., in the Finnish Government Programme, the introduction ends with the following appeal:

“Being in the middle of changes is not always easy, and we know that we will also face difficulties. We can succeed when we all take part in the transformation and in meeting the objectives.”

In the introduction of the Estonian Governance Program and Governance Agreement, pathos is baked in the description of the current situation:

“COVID-19 is not the only thing that has had a devastating effect on people’s well-being. We have also had to fight the global pandemic of evil that, even before the coronavirus, had begun to weaken the sense of unity and cooperation between and within nations. Without teamwork, there will soon be no more work. If there is no work to bring bread to the table, the lives of people will no longer be worthwhile.”

We will discuss the government programs in general and focus on pathos.

 

References

https://www.valitsus.ee/valitsuse-eesmargid-ja-tegevused/valitsemise-alused/tegevusprogramm

https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/161935

Milena Podolsak, Stockholm University

 

The language of politics makes regular use of motion metaphors. This has been shown by discursive and corpus approaches to conceptual metaphor (e.g. Musolff 2004, Semino 2008), but such studies often focus on non-schematic elements of journey metaphor, such as MODE OF TRAVEL or CROSSROAD. The intricate mechanism of mappings involving the MOTION domain, as well as Force Dynamics (Talmy 2000) aspect of it, are thus left largely unexamined. My study focuses on how political speakers assign agentivity by utilizing general motion metaphors, such as “Sweden is going in the wrong direction” (Ulf Kristersson, the Moderate Party, 2020) and “we need to take the Swedish countryside forward” (Annie Lööf, the Centre Party, 2021). Metaphorical motion is analyzed by adapting the analytical model for cross-linguistic examination of non-figurative motion, developed within Holistic Spatial Semantics (Zlatev et al. 2010). I argue that this approach is particularly suitable for showing the inner workings and rhetorical effects of abstract motion observed in the compiled corpus of Swedish political speeches. Firstly, HSS-approach is highly precise when it comes to numerous semantic components expressing motion. Secondly, its view of meaning as being distributed across the whole utterance (Naidu et al. 2018: 9) is particularly suitable for analyzing the argumentative role of metaphor. In other words, HSS does not regard any component as central to the meaning construction and allows one to incorporate situational context and pragmatic knowledge into the analysis.

By classifying different types of metaphorical motion and by comparing them, this study shows that certain lexicogrammatical constructions expressing motion are preferred and formulaically used by politicians. The analysis of semantic roles of participants in figurative motion situations reveals how complex political processes are conceptualized as forces causing and/or controlling the figurative change of location. Abstract notions such as “the Swedish society” and “our land” are systematically framed in two opposite ways depending on the speaker’s rhetorical strategy – either as an active entity propelling its own motion or as a passive entity set in motion by an Agent or an Instrument. These conclusions contribute to a more nuanced understanding of motion metaphors in political argumentation, both as an entrenched conceptual structure in its own right but also as building material for creative metaphorical extensions.

 

References

Musolff, A. (2004). Metaphor and political discourse. Analogical reasoning in debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Naidu, V., Zlatev, J., Duggirala, V., Weijer, J. V. D., Devylder, S., & Blomberg, J. (2018). Holistic spatial semantics and post-Talmian motion event typology: A case study of Thai and Telugu. Cognitive Semiotics, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2018-2002

Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Concept Structuring Systems (Vol. 1). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Zlatev, J., Blomberg, J., & David, C. (2010). Translocation, language and the categorization of experience. In V. Evans & P. Chilton (Eds.), Language, Cognition and Space – The State of the Art and New Directions, pp. 389-418. https://journals.equinoxpub.com/books/article/view/22050

Mariann Proos, University of Tartu

Maria Reile, University of Tartu

Vague quantifiers, such as few, some, most, are words that refer to an underspecified amount of things. They do not directly map onto an exact numeric system, but are rather argued to map onto a separate, approximate numeric system (Coventry et al., 2010). The mapping can be influenced by a number of different factors, such as linguistic frequency of the expression (Newstead & Collis, 1987), the spatial arrangement of the objects in relation to background objects (Coventry et al., 2010; Newstead & Coventry, 2000), and the number of objects vs. the number of background objects (Coventry et al., 2005).

In this paper, we report results from an experiment with two Estonian quantifiers: paar ’a couple’ and mõned ’some’. Both of these quantifiers are used to express a small, countable amount of something, as in Poisil on paar õuna ’The boy has a couple of apples’ or Poisil on mõned õunad ’The boy has some apples’. Paar has a strong connotation of mapping onto two objects, and similarly to English pair and German Paar, the Estonian paar also refers to entities that are composed of two parts (e.g. paar kääre ‘a pair of scissors’). Furthermore, Pezzelle et al. (2018) have found that there seems to be a larger perceived difference between the categories of small-amount quantifiers than large-amount quantifiers, i.e. there is a larger difference between few and some than between many and a lot. Considering the latter and the etymology of paar, mõned õunad and paar õuna should refer to a different amount of apples. Nevertheless, paar and mõned can also be used seemingly interchangeably, as in õues on paar kraadi sooja ‘there are a couple of plus degrees outside’ vs. õues on mõned kraadid sooja ‘there are some plus degrees outside’. This raises the questions of which parts of the numeric scale paar and mõned actually occupy, and under which conditions.

We use a picture choice paradigm to investigate the scope of paar and mõned. Participants see a sentence such as Poisil on paar õuna ‘The boy has a couple of apples’ and they have to choose a picture that best matches the sentence. On each picture, there is a different number of target objects. We explore two conditions in the experiment: one with only target objects, and one with the addition of non-target background objects. From the two stimulus pictures simultaneously shown to the participant, we expect to see paar consistently matched with the picture that depicts fewer objects (even if the number of objects is greater than two) and mõned to be matched with the picture that depicts the larger number of objects.

 

References

Coventry, K. R., Cangelosi, A., Newstead, S. E., Bacon, A., & Rajapakse, R. (2005). Grounding natural language quantifiers in visual attention. In B. G. Bara, L. W. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 506–511).

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Coventry, K. R., Cangelosi, A., Newstead, S. E., & Bugmann, D. (2010). Talking about quantities in space: Vague quantifiers, context and similarity. Language and Cognition, 2(2), 221–241. https://doi.org/10.1515/langcog.2010.009

Newstead, S. E., & Collis, J. M. (1987). Context and the interpretation of quantifiers of frequency. Ergonomics, 30(10), 1447–1462. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140138708966038

Newstead, S. E., & Coventry, K. R. (2000). The role of context and functionality in the interpretation of quantifiers. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 12(2), 243–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/095414400382145

Pezzelle, S., Bernardi, R., & Piazza, M. (2018). Probing the mental representation of quantifiers. Cognition, 181, 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.08.009

Misuzu Shimotori, University of Bergen

 

Referentially ambiguous usage of personal pronouns is an interesting research theme in the sense that personal pronouns are universally lexicalized in human languages, while their referential usages are pragmatically varied depending on, for instance, illocutionary force (e.g., Austin 1975, Searle 1969), the context of discourse situation (e.g., Dancygier 2008, 2017), and even the social conventions of the place where the language is spoken. For example, many scholars point out specific uses of Japanese personal pronouns not found in many Indo-European languages (e.g., Oishi 2017, Yee & Wong 2021). Japanese language has several 1SG pronouns, and native speakers of Japanese take on different 1SG pronoun depending on their personalities and the context of utterance. Interestingly, certain 1SG address forms can also refer to the second person as the occasion demands. When an adult person asks a little boy a question, s/he may use a 1SG pronoun to refer to the boy; Boku no onamae wa? ‘What is your name? (lit. What is my name?)’. The 1SG pronoun boku is used only by males and is commonly used by boys. In the example, the addresser changes his/her point of view and kneels down to the child’s level so that the boy gets a sense of intimacy with the adult person.

This study examines uses of 1SG pronouns in a specific type of discourse, i.e., Japanese advertising copy, to understand how readers identify their referents. In linguistics, advertising copy is a fascinating research area because it reveals copywriters’ thought processes, from the creativity of advertising copy to the realm of metaphor apparent both in language and in visible information like pictures. This study will focus on a subtle communication strategy between advertising copy and the readers, in other words, with potential consumers. In particular, I am interested in which pronouns elicit the greatest empathy with 1SG pronoun “I” of the advertising copy. Ultimately, based on data from recently published Japanese magazines and a survey of 307 native speakers, I argue that while the 1SG pronouns watashi, boku, and jibun are all used in advertising, jibun seems to be most readily understood as referring to the reader him-/herself. This conclusion is significant because it suggests that the pronoun jibun may be most effective in creating attractive advertisements for native Japanese readers. Based on these results, I suggest that readers’ different perceptions of the referent person of advertising copy have important implications for advertisement copywriting.

Maija Surakka, Tampere University

 

This presentation explores how event cognition, the domain-general cognitive capability, underlies children’s development of the expressions of time. Previous studies have brought forth this interrelation (Ames, 1943; Weist, 1989; Surakka, 2019) but no systematic observation, to my knowledge, has yet been conducted.

In this presentation, I will first review studies that have taken a stand on the mentioned relationship. As a result of my observation, I will outline a developmental path that combines the perspectives of event cognition and linguistic expression of time in children. The path will be presented with empiric examples form the corpus data of the Finnish-speaking children from 2½ to 8 years of age. The corpus has been collected as audio recordings and diary notes. In addition to children’s utterances, the corpus contains information about the people, space, actions, and shared knowledge that took place or were referred to in the usage event.

Capability of perceiving and segmenting action patterns has occurred to be essential in children’s verb acquisition (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek 2006). Expressions of time are typically adverbials that modify the verb element in utterances. Therefore, the perspective of verbs (including tense and aspect) cannot be bypassed when observing the adverbial development. Event cognition (Ibbotson 2020: 58–69) is built on the children’s understanding of action patterns. By development, children become aware of actions being meaningful and having beginnings, ends and inner structure. Actions in an event may occur sequentially or simultaneously; especially when simultaneously, the phenomenon of person perspective joins the cognitive repertoire needed in the interpretation of an event.

The first indication of linguistic action boundary marking (postulating action boundary recognition) in Finnish concerns early verb inflection. In the study of Laalo (2003: 330–333), the child, 18 months of age, formulates a verb form that builds up an early contrast between the present and past tense by uttering loppu ‘ended’ (when the child has finished eating some food). The presentation will shed light on how the development of event cognition being manifest in children’s expressions of time continues at the later phases of development and becomes manifest in temporal adverbials.

The theoretical emphasis of the presentation bases on the Usage-based approach to language acquisition (Tomasello Lieven & Tomasello 2008), the literature on the event cognition (Ibbotson 2020: 58–69), and studies addressing the event-centered conceptualization as the conceptual basis of the expressions of time in children (Ames, 1943; Weist, 1989; Surakka, 2019).

 

References

Ames, L. B. (1946). The development of the sense of time in the young child. Journal of Genetic Psychology 68(1), 97–126.

Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2006). Introduction: Progress on the verb learning front. In K. Hirsh-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs (pp. 3–28). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ibbotson, P. 2020. What it takes to talk. Exploring developmental cognitive linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter

Laalo, K. (2003). Early verb development in Finnish: A preliminary approach to miniparadigms. In D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, & M. Kilani-Schoch (Eds.), Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (pp. 323–350). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Mouton.

Lieven, E. V. & Tomasello, M. (2008). Children’s first language acquisition from a usage-based perspective. In Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 168–196). New York: Routledge.

Surakka (2019). Ajan paikka. Ajanilmausten kehityspolkuja lasten kielessä [A location of time. The development of the expressions of time in children’s language]. Publications of the University of Eastern Finland Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology. Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland.

Weist, M. (1989). Time concepts in language and thought: Filling the Piagetian void from 2 to 5 years. In Levin & D. Dakay (Eds.), Time and human cognition. A life-span perspective (pp. 63–118). Advances in psychology 59. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Piia Taremaa, University of Tartu

Johanna Kiik, University of Tartu

Leena Karin Toots, University of Tartu

Ann Veismann, University of Tartu

 

Theories of embodiment suggest that language is grounded in perception and action (Johnson 1987; Barsalou 2008). This means that language evokes bodily simulations of the described event (Matlock 2004; Bergen & Wheeler 2010; Speed & Vigliocco 2014) and our experiences and perception are ultimately reflected in the structure of language (Clark 2006). Importantly though, not all cognitive domains evoke mental simulations (Speed & Majid 2018). Thus, there is an urgent need to examine the possible embodiment traces in diverse contexts of language use. Thus, we set out to focus on one specific, yet underlying dimension of motion which has received relatively little research attention: speed. In particular, we examine speech rate and the structure of motion descriptions in relation to the speed of the event.

We conducted the frog stories production task with Estonian speakers following the basic design of Berman and Slobin (1994). In this task, participants are asked to narrate a story based on the sequence of pictures from the book ‘Frog, where are you?’ (Mayer 1969). In our experiment, participants (N = 45) were divided into three groups each receiving different instructions with regard to narrating. Visual stimuli were constant across the three conditions. Each condition group included 15 participants. Participants in Condition A (control) were given no specific instructions as to how they should narrate the story. Participants in Condition B (slow) had to narrate the story as if the events evolved very slowly. Participants in Condition C (fast) had to narrate the story as if the events evolved very fast. Narrating was audio-recorded and transcribed, and, finally, analysed in terms of speech rate, narration length and the semantic structure of individual clauses in the narrations.

The two main results were as follows. Firstly, narrations in Condition B (slow) were substantially longer and had slower speech rates than those in Condition C (fast). Secondly, the expression of spatial aspects of the scenes was relatively similar across the conditions, but in Condition B (slow), manner was detailed more frequently than in Conditions A and C. These results indicate sensorimotor response to different speeds of motion when describing such events. They also show that in addition to the typological profile of a language, the expression of manner may depend on the characteristics of the described event itself.

 

References

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (2008): Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59. 617-645.

Bergen, Benjamin & Kathryn Wheeler (2010): Grammatical aspect and mental simulation. Brain and Language. Elsevier. 112(3). 150-158.

Berman, Ruth A. & Dan Isaac Slobin (Hrsg.) (1994): Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. New York / London: Psychology Press.

Clark, Andy (2006): Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Elsevier. 10(8). 370-374.

Johnson, Mark (1987): The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matlock, Teenie (2004): Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory & Cognition 32(8). 1389-1400.

Mayer, Mercer (1969): Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press.

Speed, Laura J. & Asifa Majid (2018): An exception to mental simulation: No evidence for embodied odor language. Cognitive Science. Wiley Online Library. 42(4). 1146-1178.

Speed, Laura J. & Gabriella Vigliocco (2014): Eye movements reveal the dynamic simulation of speed in language. Cognitive Science 38(2). 367-382.

Heli Tissari, University of Helsinki

Oskari Koskela, University of Jyväskylä

Kai Tuuri, University of Jyväskylä

 

In a classic article, Johnson and Larson (2003) suggested that we conceptualize music through the MOVING MUSIC, MUSICAL LANDSCAPE and MOVING FORCE metaphors. Their focus was on describing how we experience compositions, which they illustrated with sentences such as: “The melody rises up ahead. At measure 4 the horns enter.” (Johnson & Larson 2003: 71.) But what if we ask people to reminisce their fond experiences with music, like Gabrielsson (2011)?

We asked Finnish and British people about fond memories of the music of digital games, and received 183 autobiographical texts from Finns and 389 from Brits. They contain comments such as “…the music seemed to understand me, as if it were a friend of mine who comforted and encouraged me to endure a stressful time.” (A Finnish writer). As the example indicates, the focus in the stories is not necessarily in describing dynamic episodes of musical experiences, but they often describe the nature of relationship with the music in question.

We have analysed the Finnish data and suggest that there are eight main categories of metaphors there. We have labelled them AGENCY, FORCE, SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS, VEHICLE, MEDIATOR, CONNECTION/JOINT, OBJECT and FEEL. Johnson and Larson’s (2003) MOVING FORCE metaphor is close to VEHICLE, and they talk about agency and objects. However, they have not identified such metaphors as CONNECTION/JOINT or FEEL. To put it simply, our metaphors seem to be more static. The question is, does this relate to the fact that we are talking about memories of music, or to the fact that we are talking about the music of digital games?

Our aim for this talk is to proceed to analysing the British data, so that we can present findings concerning both sets of data and make comparisons. Our tentative finding so far is that several of the metaphor categories are shared between the two data sets but that there are some expressions that are typical of one or the other. For example, Finnish people often talk about storing the music in their minds or heads. In the British data, music is often a bringer of something: “I recently heard the music on a YouTube video I was watching and it brought back memories of myself and my younger brother playing the game on the weekends.”

 

References

Gabrielsson, Alf. 2011. Strong experiences with music: Music is much more than just music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Mark L. & Steve Larson. 2003. ”Something in the way she moves”– metaphors of musical motion. Metaphor and symbol 18(2), 63-84.

Emilia Tuuri, Tampere University

Anneli Pajunen, Tampere University

“Event segmentation is the process by which people parse a continuous stream of activity into meaningful events” (Zacks & Swallow 2007, emphasis ours). On the level of cognition, event segmentation somewhat consistently follows certain patterns: when asked to define event boundaries by pressing a button while watching a movie, participants with different backgrounds end up in very uniform judgments. Event segmentation is automatic and hierarchically structured. (Zacks & Swallow 2007.) On the level of language and encoding events, more variation arises.

Cross-linguistic variation in encoding events is widely documented, especially in the context of motion events (e.g. Bohnemeyer et al. 2007), but there is also variation within speakers of a single language, for example in factors such as granularity of description or accuracy in naming the event. Some of the variation depends on individual differences in visual perception that is known to be highly selective: we tend to pay attention to the details that are crucial in understanding the current situation (Baker & Levin 2015). Encoding also varies with respect to the situations that are described.

Elicitation with visual stimuli can be used to capture different levels of variation. We have used the video grid Trajectoire (Ishibashi et al. 2006) to collect event descriptions from 50 young adult native speakers of Finnish. The videos represent different kinds of actions and activities performed by actors. Most of the stimuli include motion events (e.g. a woman walks into a cave), others display for example manipulation of objects (e.g. a woman folds a dress) or static situations (e.g. a man lies on the lawn). The stimuli contain both bounded and unbounded events, which is an important factor with respect to event segmentation (Ji & Papafragou 2020).

In our talk, we discuss the 3185 descriptions of the 64 video events that include one moving or acting Figure (dismissing interactions at this point). The descriptions are analyzed from the point of view of language-internal variation in event segmentation and naming and assessed with respect to different cognitive factors that are involved in event cognition.

 

References

Baker, L. J. & Levin, D. T. 2015. The role of relational triggers in event perception. Cognition 136, 14–29.

Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N. J., Essegbey, J., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Kita, S., Lüpke, F. & Ameka, F. K. 2007. Principles of event segmentation in language: The case of motion events. Language. 83(3), 495–532.

Ishibashi, M., Kopecka, A., & Vuillermet, M. 2006. Trajectoire: Matériel licit pour licitation des données linguistiques. Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CRNS/Université Lyon 2) – Fédération de Recherche en Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques, CRNS, France.

Ji, Y. & Papafragou, A. 2020. Midpoints, endpoints and the cognitive structure of events. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2020.1797839.

Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. 2007. Event segmentation. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(2), 80–84.

Kristian Tylén, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University

Roberta Rocca, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University

 

Across a number of domains within design, innovation, research and education, ideation processes unfold in collaborative contexts where two or more individuals interact to find novel and useful solutions to a problem. Divergent thinking is considered a central component of creative ideation, and many classical creativity tests attempt to measure the ability of individuals to flexibly and fluently come up with as many and as different associations as possible in response to a prompt (Baer, 2014; Runco, 2010).

The influence of social interaction on creative processes of divergent thinking remains controversial: some studies report benefits from interaction while some do not (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019; Brophy, 1998; Kohn & Smith, 2011; Mullen et al., 1991). One problem in this regard is that most existing studies only measure the performance of individuals and groups “offline” in terms of the number and quality of resulting solutions, while the underlying cognitive mechanisms of unfolding divergent thinking processes are often not accessible (Said-Metwaly et al., 2017).

The purpose of this study is to address the underlying computational cognitive, linguistic, and social mechanisms of collective divergent thinking, in order to unravel their dynamics and how they relate to performance. In particular, we use agent-based simulation to investigate how the degree of cognitive diversity between interaction partners affects collective semantic search processes. Agents performed a verbal association task individually and jointly in pairs. We created pairs of varying cognitive diversity by manipulating properties of the vector spaces defining their semantic memories. We find that cognitive diversity positively stimulates the flexibility of agents’ collective semantic search, giving rise to higher fluency (more associations) and originality (more ‘rare’ associations). While cognitively similar agents tend to exploit local semantic neighborhoods, diversity promotes more explorative search, with longer distances traveled in semantic space. This helps diverse pairs reach more distant areas of semantic space and escape cognitive fixation. However, we also find that too high levels of diversity can have detrimental effects, as overly exploratory behaviors make pairs leave solution saturated areas prematurely and increase the risk of reaching semantic “dead ends”.

 

References

Aggarwal, I., & Woolley, A. W. (2019). Team creativity, cognition, and cognitive style diversity. Management Science, 65(4), 1586–1599.

Baer, J. (2014). Creativity and divergent thinking: A task-specific approach. Psychology Press. Brophy, D. R. (1998). Understanding, measuring, enhancing collective creative problemsolving efforts. Creativity Research Journal, 11(3), 199–229.

Kohn, N. W., & Smith, S. M. (2011). Collaborative fixation: Effects of others’ ideas on brainstorming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(3), 359–371.

Mullen, B., Johnson, C., & Salas, E. (1991). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: A metaanalytic integration. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 12(1), 3–23.

Runco, M. A. (2010). Divergent thinking, creativity, and ideation.

Said-Metwaly, S., Van den Noortgate, W., & Kyndt, E. (2017). Approaches to measuring creativity: A systematic literature review. Creativity. Theories–Research-Applications, 4(2), 238–275.