Adults category learning is accelerated by redundant verbal labels (Lupyan et al., 2007). However, it is an open questionhow category representations are affected by labeling. Here, we presented subjects with a learning task that involvedseparating sine wave gratings of differing spatial frequency and orientation into two categories. Categories of easy, mediumand difficult separability were constructed. Participants (N=128) either received only feedback sounds during training, orheard verbal labels in addition. Growth curve analysis (Mirman, 2014) was used, fitting 2nd order polynomials to the dataacross the learning phase. In addition to main effects of difficulty on intercepts and the linear time term, the best-fittingmodel showed an effect of labeling on the linear time term, with steeper learning curves in conditions with labeling. Therewas no interaction of labeling and difficulty, indicating that the impact of labeling is similar across the types of categoriesused here.

We investigate the processing of inflected verbs in Bengali. The word forms involve an interaction of orthography andphonology: the 1st Person singular is formed from the 3rd Person by adding the suffix /-i/. For stem vowels [, e, , o]this causes the stem vowel to be raised. For [e, o] this is reflected orthographically, but not for [,]. We examine thisin a cross-modal priming study and an eye tracking task where an auditory first-syllable fragment is matched to eitherthe 1st or 3rd Person visual form. We show that orthography plays an important role, with mismatching forms beingless effective as primes, and fragment completion being easier for patterns with different orthography. For words withno orthographic difference, manual responses to fragment completion were at chance, but eye tracking revealed distinctmatch vs. mismatch processing. We discuss implications for roles of orthography and phonology in lexical access.

During the first year of life, infants develop a remarkable ability to group objects based on their similarities and differences. This ability of category formation represents one of the main mechanisms underlying the organisation of the semantic system. Early categories are formed spontaneously, in a non-supervised fashion and this type of category acquisition remains present even when more sophisticated forms of supervised category learning emerge. Even though there are various models of categorisation mechanisms across the lifespan, there is a gap in the research investigating implicit categorisation at different stages of cognitive development. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to compare processes of spontaneous concept formation in infants and adults using an experimental paradigm based on novelty preference. We discovered that both infants and adults show evidence of category learning (Experiment 1), though with different amount of training being needed to achieve the task. Adults successfully categorised objects already after a single block of training. Infants reached a level comparable to that of adults after twice the amount of training. As these tasks inevitably pose different cognitive and sensory demands to the two groups, in Experiments 2 and 3 we explored how varying parameters of the learning context affect dynamics of category formation. Decreasing memory demands of the task resulted in an acceleration of infants’ category formation (Experiment 2), whereas posing memory load in an implicit category learning task decelerated adults’ dynamics of category formation (Experiment 3).

Scandinavian languages like Swedish employ tonal accent as a lexical phonological feature, where suprasegmentalinformation can be the sole factor differentiating between words. Using cross-modal semantic fragment priming we testedthe following: (a) Do monolingual speakers of Swedish use tonal accent information during lexical access? (b) Do bilingualspeakers, who grew up with one tonal (Swedish) and one non-tonal language, treat this feature the same way as monolinguals?Our results show that for monolinguals, accent mispronunciations eliminate priming effects, implying that tone is used duringlexical access. For bilinguals, by contrast, mispronunciation sensitivity depends on both the accent type and its distributionacross the linguistic input, as well as on the lexical neighbourhood.