What is ‘counterintuitive’? There is general agreement that it refers to a violation of previously held knowledge, but the precise definition seems to vary with every author and study. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the notion of ‘counterintuitive’ and provide a more philosophically rigorous definition congruent with the history of psychology, recent experimental work in ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts, the science vs. religion debate, and the developmental and evolutionary background of human beings. We conclude that previous definitions of (...) counterintuitiveness have been flawed and did not resolve the conflict between a believer’s conception of the supernatural entity (an atypical “real kind”) and the non-believer’s conception (empty name/fictional). Furthermore, too much emphasis has been placed on the universality and (presumed) innateness of intuitive concepts (and hence the criteria for what is counterintuitive)—and far too little attention paid to learning and expertise. We argue that many putatively universal concepts are not innate, but mostly learned and defeasible—part of a religious believer’s repertoire of expert knowledge. Nonetheless, the results from empirical studies about the memorability of counterintuitive concepts have been convincing and it is difficult to improve on existing designs and methodologies. However, future studies in counterintuitive concepts need to embed their work in research about context effects, typicality, the psychology of learning and expertise (for example, the formation of expert templates and range defaults), with more attention to the sources of knowledge (direct and indirect knowledge) and a better idea of what ‘default’ knowledge really is. (shrink)

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a protracted period of inconsistent use of tense/agreement morphemes. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether this inconsistent use could be attributed to the children's misinterpretations of particular syntactic structures in the input. In Study 1, preschool-aged children with SLI and typically developing peers heard sentences containing novel verbs preceded by auxiliarywasor sentences in which the novel verb formed part of a nonfinite subject-verb sequence within a larger syntactic structure (e.g.We saw (...) the dog relling). The children were then tested on their use of the novel verbs in contexts that obligated use of auxiliaryis. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and more likely to produce the novel verb withoutisif the verb had been heard in a nonfinite subject-verb sequence. In Study 2, children with SLI and typically developing peers were tested on their comprehension of sentences such asThe cow sees the horse eating. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and were disproportionately influenced by the nonfinite subject-verb clause at the end of the sentence. We interpret these findings within the framework of construction learning. (shrink)

This paper examines the suggestion that infinitivaltoomission errors in English-speaking children can result from competition between two constructions (Kirjavainen et al., First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a). Kirjavainen et al. suggested that the acquisition of two (or more) constructions (e.g., WANT-X and WANT-to) for verbs takingto-infinitival complement clauses can lead to infinitivaltoomissions, reflecting the relative frequencies of the constructions in the input. In the present study we analysed 13 English children's corpora to determine whether the presence of a variety of utterance (...) types in the immediate discourse context preceding WANT-to-VP (e.g.,I want to eat it) and erroneous *WANT-zero-VP (e.g., *I want__drink it) constructions was associated with infinitivaltoproduction/omission. This was done separately for the children's own and their interlocutors' discourse utterances. The data show that the occurrence of WANT-toand WANT-X constructions in the prior discourse was associated with differing proportions of infinitivaltoprovision in the WANT-to/zero-VP construction. This together with Kirjavainen et al.'s (First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a) data suggests that children are learning at least two constructions for the verb WANT, that competition contributes to infinitivaltoomissions, and that the strength of competing representations is affected by overall input frequencies and the preceding discourse. (shrink)

Increasing working memory (WM) capacity is often cited as a major influence on children's development and yet WM capacity is difficult to examine independently of long‐term knowledge. A computational model of children's nonword repetition (NWR) performance is presented that independently manipulates long‐term knowledge and WM capacity to determine the relative contributions of each in explaining the developmental data. The simulations show that (a) both mechanisms independently cause the same overall developmental changes in NWR performance, (b) increase in long‐term knowledge provides (...) the better fit to the child data, and (c) varying both long‐term knowledge and WM capacity adds no significant gains over varying long‐term knowledge alone. Given that increases in long‐term knowledge must occur during development, the results indicate that increases in WM capacity may not be required to explain developmental differences. An increase in WM capacity should only be cited as a mechanism of developmental change when there are clear empirical reasons for doing so. (shrink)

In several papers, Hubert Dreyfus has used chess as a paradigmatic example of how experts act intuitively, rarely using deliberation when selecting actions, while individuals that are only competent rely on analytic and deliberative thought. By contrast, Montero and Evans (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10:175–194, 2011 ) argue that intuitive aspects of chess are actually rational, in the sense that actions can be justified. In this paper, I show that both Dreyfus’s and Montero and Evans’s views are too extreme, (...) and that expertise in chess, and presumably in other domains, depends on a combination of intuitive thinking and deliberative search, both mediated by perceptual processes. There is more to expertise than just rational thought. I further contend that both sides ignore emotions, which are important in acquiring and maintaining expertise. Finally, I argue that experimental data and first-person data, which are sometimes presented as irreconcilable in the phenomenology literature, actually lead to similar conclusions. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input (...) language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (...) (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)