communication

Common words, uncommon meanings: Evidence for widespread gender differences in word meaning

Communication relies on a shared understanding of word meaning; however, recent evidence suggests that individual variation in meaning exists even for common nouns. Understanding where and how this variation arises is therefore integral to …

Online communication to the ingroup and the outgroup: The role of identity in the "what" and "why" of information sharing

How and why do people share opinions online? In research conducted offline, the social identity of the audience is a key factor: whether they are composed of one’s ingroup or outgroup affects what people share and why. Do people behave similarly and …

Word prediction in context: An empirical investigation of core vocabulary

Core vocabulary is a topic of huge interest in linguistics and has been studied from a wide variety of perspectives, such as language learning, dictionary studies, and cross-linguistically. In many of these conceptions, word frequency is widely …

Core words in semantic representation

A central question in cognitive science is how semantic information is mentally represented. Two dominant theories of semantic representation are language-based distributional semantic models (which suggest that word meaning is based on which words …

Where the truth lies: How sampling implications drive deception without lying

Efficient communication leaves gaps between message and meaning. Interlocutors, by reasoning about how each other reasons, can help to fill these gaps. To the extent that such meta-inference is not calibrated, communication is impaired, raising the …