Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing.

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Sederias I, Krakovitch A, Stojanovik V, Zimmerer VC (2024). Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing. Journal of Child Language. Published online 2024:1-15. doi:10.1017/S0305000924000436

This work has been fun on so many levels. First, it connects my current research with my very early experiences with language sciences. Williams syndrome was often used as an example to illustrate how language functions as an independent cognitive “module” - or, even better, an “organ” - which doesn’t always behave like other functions of the brain/mind. I was academically raised with that belief, and now it was time to scrutinize it.

Second, the people with whom I worked were fantastic. This paper is based on a secondary data analysis conducted by two then-final-year undergraduate students, Ioana Sederias and Ariane Krakovitch, who I supervised. These were the years of the Covid lockdowns - dark and stressful at least for me - and working with these two smart and fun students was one of the few bright spots during that time.

Finally, the project itself went remarkably smoothly. Our predictions came naturally from previous observations and the data supported them strongly. Some confused head-scratching is fairly typical when one first looks at results, but not here. The data tell a very clear story. And this is the story:

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Language formulas - for your convenience.

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Let's say you know about 30,000 words in your language, which, according to some studies, makes you slightly above average. Some of these entries are everyday words, such as "you", "door", or "go". Others are more rare, like "aghast" and "triptychon". Some of these words are easy to access, usually those that we use often and have a more concrete ("dog") than abstract ("democracy") meaning. There is also an effect of "age of acquisition" in that words that we learned earlier in life seem cognitively more anchored. It is difficult to tell this effect apart from frequency of use, since children tend to learn everyday words first.

If your language system works like the majority of language models suggest, it is based on "words and rules". All words, or at least their roots, are stored in a mental lexicon, and when you utter a sentence your system retrieves each needed word and applies combinatorial ("grammatical") principles to generate the utterance. This needs to happen within fractions of a second. Our system must work like this at least to some degree since we can use our word and combinatorial knowledge to generate a virtually infinite number of sentences.

But how often do we need this procedure?

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