Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

Statistical learning is a key concept in our understanding of language acquisition. Ample work has highlighted its role in numerous linguistic functions--yet statistical learning is not a unitary construct, and its consistency across different language properties remains unclear. In a meta-analysis of auditory-linguistic statistical learning…

Numerous studies have examined the acoustic correlates of sentential stress and its underlying linguistic functionality. However, the mechanism that connects stress cues to the listener's attentional processing has remained unclear. Also, the learnability versus innateness of stress perception has not been widely discussed. In this work, we…

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as…

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to…