Interactivity of language

Spevack, Samuel; Falandays, J. Benjamin; Batzloff, Brandon; Spivey, Michael J.

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12282

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 134 publications

(134 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thompson, Roberts, & Lupyan, 2020). Due to the highly interactive nature of the brain/mind, linguistic knowledge influences thought and action in myriad ways (Falandays, Batzloff, Spevack, & Spivey, 2020;Spevack, Falandays, Batzloff, & Spivey, 2018). Thus, there is some reason to think that if our language licenses particular ontological commitments, then our thought will be biased accordingly.…”

Section: Weird and General Biases Towards Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

Falandays¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the fallout of the replication crisis, several authors have pointed to an underlying "theory crisis" in the cognitive sciences, which are argued to lack a core set of shared principles, assumptions, and methodologies. In this essay, I contend that one major barrier to an integrated field stems from a widespread, often implicit ontological commitment among scientists to substance ontology: the metaphysical view that reality is composed of one or more fundamental, static, independent entities. I argue that this metaphysical assumption contributes to the impression that alternative theoretical decompositions of systems are logically incompatible. I consider cognitive, cultural, and historical reasons for the little-challenged dominance of substance thinking in scientific thought, but suggest that the philosophical foundations are shaky. As such, the field may benefit from engaging more deeply with alternative metaphysical traditions that can be grouped as "process ontologies": the family of views that tend to deny the idea of a fundamental level, take existence to be inherently relational, and emphasize that nature is inherently dynamic. I offer a brief survey of Western philosophical traditions that speak to one or more aspects of process thought, but shine a spotlight in particular on useful concepts from Buddhist and Daoist philosophical traditions. I consider three necessary aspects of all living systems that cannot be accounted for within substance ontology, but can by process: (1) fuzzy boundaries, (2) causal loops, and (3) change. I conclude by suggesting that process ontology may help the field of cognitive science progress by dissolving ill-founded debates regarding the fundamental level of analysis, opening a path for a rigorous meta-theory of cognition.

show abstract

Section: Weird and General Biases Towards Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

Falandays¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Semantic alignment is not predetermined but is generated as a conversation progresses and meaning is negotiated and debated. Spevack et al (2018) described conversation as marked with ambiguities that are progressively addressed and resolved through dynamic and unpredictable interaction. This dynamic nature of conversation can be contrasted with comparatively static types of interactions such as letters or emails and other verbal interactions such as giving instructions which feature a predominantly one-way flow of information.…”

Section: Conversations In Healthcarementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These approaches can be described as process analysis which focus on in-depth coding of data and the microanalysis of conversational features (Heritage & Maynard, 2006). Various elements of conversation are described in terms such as syntax, semantics and phonetics (Spevack et al, 2018).…”

Section: Conversations In Healthcarementioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing Conversations in Health Care: Using Discursis to Compare Cantonese and English Data Sets

Yau

Turnbull

Angus

et al. 2020

The Humanities in Asia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Health care is shaped by often complex communication between multiple people such as doctors, nurses, patients and carers. Research has repeatedly shown that effective communication is key to safe and high-quality care yet improving communication remains a challenge across health systems. In recent years the field of natural language processing has developed analytic tools to supplement the study of verbal communication through visual representation of anlaysis. To date these tools have primarily been used on English data. This study used the software tool Discursis to compare visual representations of Cantonese conversational data that were analysed before and after English translation. Results indicate that some linguistic features of Cantonese that carry meaning through may be lost in translation into English. Specific concerns relate to the multidimensional issues of equivalence, ranging from cultural and social associations to semantic, lexical and conceptual differences. These results highlight the importance of developing visual analytic tools that can be used on Cantonese data. Generating visual representations of such data contributes to local and international understandings about communication in health care.

show abstract

“…Language use during interpersonal conversation offers unique insight into the processes that support coordinated behaviors (Clark, 1996;Tylén, Weed, Wallentin, Roepstorff, & Frith, 2010). Importantly, the basis for conversation has been thought of as a continuous, oftentimes implicit, alignment of multiple scales of behaviors and mental processes, with nonlinear interactions between levels (Spevack, Falandays, Batzloff, & Spivey, 2018). For example, the interactive alignment model posits that establishment of the mutual understanding required for comprehension of linguistic exchanges occurs across multiple levels, ranging from phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and finally a situation model that represents specific contexts, with complex interactions occurring between these scales.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond frequency counts: Novel conceptual recurrence analysis metrics to index semantic coordination in team communications

Tolston¹,

Riley

Mancuso

et al. 2018

Behav Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Semantic alignment is a key process underlying interpersonal and team communication. However, semantic similarity is difficult to quantify, and statistical approaches designed to measure it often rely on methods that make the identification of the relative importance of key words difficult. This study outlines how conceptual recurrence analysis (CRA) can address these issues and can be used to detect conceptual structure in interpersonal communication. We developed several novel CRA metrics to analyze communication data reported previously by Mancuso, Finomore, Rahill, Blair, and Funke (Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 58, 405-409, 2014), gathered from teams who worked cooperatively on a logic puzzle under different cognitive biasing contexts. CRA, like other measures of semantic coordination, relies on parameters whose values affect estimates of semantic alignment. We evaluated how the dimensionality of semantic spaces affects metrics quantifying the conceptual similarity of communicative exchanges, and whether metrics calculated from top-down, a priori semantic spaces or bottom-up semantic spaces empirically derived from each data set were more sensitive to biasing context. We found that the novel CRA measures were sensitive to manipulations of cognitive bias, and that higher-dimensional, bottom-up semantic spaces generally yielded more sensitivity to the experimental manipulations, though when the communication was evaluated with respect to specific key concepts, lower-dimensional, top-down spaces performed nearly as well. We conclude that CRA is sensitive to experimental manipulations in ways consistent with prior findings and that it presents a customizable framework for testing predictions about interpersonal communication patterns and other linguistic exchanges.

show abstract

Interactivity of language

Cited by 8 publications

References 134 publications

Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

Visualizing Conversations in Health Care: Using Discursis to Compare Cantonese and English Data Sets

Beyond frequency counts: Novel conceptual recurrence analysis metrics to index semantic coordination in team communications

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About