Special Issue "Cognition and Communication"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Luca Onnis
¹ Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii, 1890 East-West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
² Center for Second Language Research, University of Hawaii, 1890 East-West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lucao/
E-Mail: lucao@hawaii.edu
Phone: +1 808 956 8610
Interests: cognitive science of learning; computational models of language; statistical learning; embodied and situated cognition; bilingualism; psycholinguistics; interplay of cognitive and social factors in learning

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Michael J. Spivey
Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, 5200 N. Lake Rd., Merced, CA 95343, USA
Website: http://ucmerced.academia.edu/MichaelSpivey
E-Mail: spivey@ucmerced.edu
Interests: language/vision interaction; dynamical systems theory; embodied and situated cognition; psycholinguistics; neural networks; eye-tracking and reach-tracking

Dear Colleagues

“If internal relations can qualify as [representational] vehicles, why not external relations? Given a continuous complex dynamic system of reciprocal causal relations between organism and environment,what in principle stops the spread? The idea that vehicles might go external takes the notion ofdistributed processing to its logical extreme.”   - Susan Hurley (1998, Analysis)

The study of cognition and communication has at times been punctuated by harsh theoretical oppositions between internalist and externalist characterizations of the phenomenon at hand. For example, in the study of language -- a hallmark of human cognition -- different traditions and circles have characterized the core of language as being either inside the brain as a mental faculty or outside in the arena of communicative interaction among different interactants. While these views have been seen as incommensurable, this collection of papers aims to map the progression that binds together both internalist and externalist accounts in a new model visualization of language and communication.

From the original idea of a core grammar module separated from the rest of language-internal representations, to seeing language as a multidimensional system whose space encompasses brain and body (motor and perceptual components), to finally including situational models of interacting bodies and minds, we aim to defuse the internalist/externalist debate and replace it with a more integrative interpretation of what cognition and communication might mean. The coming together in this special issue of authors belonging to different but related disciplines (psychology, linguistics, education, communication, cognitive science, and information science) testifies to the widespread and urgent need for a reconciliatory turn in the social sciences.

Prof. Dr. Luca Onnis
Prof. Dr. Michael J. Spivey
Guest Editors

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Title: A New Model Visualization for the Language Sciences
Authors: Luca Onnis ^1,2 and Michael J. Spivey ³
Affiliations: ¹ Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii, 1890 East-West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
² Center for Second Language Research, University of Hawaii, 1890 East-West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
³ Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, 5200 N. Lake Rd., Merced, CA 95343, USA
Abstract: We advance a new model conceptualization of the human faculty of language. In analogy with the history of physics, we argue that the sciences of language are clinging to an obsolete model visualization borrowed from box-and-arrows flow charts in the early days of engineering and computer science. This obsolete model assumes that the language faculty is composed of autonomously organized levels of linguistic representation, which in turn are assumed to be modular, organized in rank order of dominance, and feed unidirectionally into one another in stage-like algorithmic procedures. We review relevant literature in psycholinguistics and language acquisition that cannot be accommodated by the received model. Levels of representation in adult language processing and language acquisition appear to be highly integrated and interconnected, and function simultaneously rather than sequentially. Therefore, we submit a new model visualization for language, in which stacked levels of linguistic representation are replaced by trajectories in a multidimensional space. Processing language in the brain equates to traversing such a space in regions afforded by multiple probabilistic cues that simultaneously activate different linguistic representations. We propose new concepts and venues for research that may assist the field in transitioning to a new conceptualization, and provide a clear direction for the next decade.

Title: The World Within Wikipedia: An Ecology of Mind
Authors: Andrew Olney *,1, Rick Dale 2, Sidney D'mello 1
Affiliations: 1. Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, 365 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152, USA; E-mails: aolney@memphis.edu (A.O.), sdmello@memphis.edu (S.D.)
2. Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, 202 Psychology Building, Memphis, TN 38152, USA; E-mails: radale@memphis.edu
Abstract: Wikipedia is a cognitive artifact of connected concepts that both reflects the understanding of its authors and shapes the understanding of its readers. We use this intuition to guide the construction of semantic relatedness models that use the graphical and distributional structure of such artifacts. Semantic relatedness judgments are a basic psycholinguistic task associated with semantic memory, discourse comprehension, and summarization. In this paper we present a model that supports the intuition that cognitive processes activated in the authoring of Wikipedia and similar corpora leave linguistic marks, which in turn, can be used to infer the semantic relatedness between words. Our model combines graphical and distributional information at different scales to achieve state of the art correlation with human ratings, r(351) = :76, on the WordSimilarity-353 task.

Title: The Ecological Mind: Bodies, Brains, and Worlds as Self-Sustaining Meaning
Author: J. Scott Jordan
Affiliation: Institute for Prospective Cognition, Department of Psychology, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4620, Normal, IL 61790-4620, USA;
E-Mail: jsjorda@ilstu.edu
Abstract: Computational approaches to mind place meaning (i.e. information) in the processing dynamics of the brain. Ecological approaches place meaning (i.e. information) in the world via the notion of affordances. At the core of this internalist-externalist tension regarding the location of meaning, lies a naturalist ontology that conceptualizes reality as constituted of "nothing" but physical processes. This 'nothing but' metaphysics forces its adherents to give scientific explanations couched in physicalist language which, in turn, forces meaning to either be identical with the physical, or 'emerge' from it.  For hundreds of years, scholars have made clear such naturalist thinking always leaves meaning logically unnecessary. In short, if phenomena referred to via the concept 'meaning' are just as real as phenomena referred to via concepts such as 'brick', 'car', and 'house', then scientists who address 'meaning' in their work (i.e. cognitive scientists and ecological psychologists) need an ontology that establishes the reality of phenomenology, meaning, and aesthetics. Wild systems theory (WST) is just such a framework. And at its core lies a shift in conceptual frame, from 'physicalism' to 'contextualism'. In short, WST conceptualizes all 'objects' as residing in context. That is, no context, not object. As a result, all objects are context dependent and, therefore, naturally and necessarily 'about' context. It is this notion of contextually emergent, embodied context that WST equates with meaning. From this perspective, there can be no internalist-externalist divide regarding meaning. All 'things' are inherently meaningful. Thus, the scientific question for cognitive science shifts from, "How do brains process information," or "how do organisms detect affordances, " to "how do multi-scale embodiments of context (i.e. organisms) sustain themselves in context.