Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does meaning influence cognitive processes involved in the production and reception of language? Thelanguage-game hypothesis (LGH) states that meaning acts to constrain the cognitive processes involved in language comprehen-sion. The degree of constraint can be gauged by measures of structuredness of a process, e.g. using Recurrence QuantificationAnalysis (RQA). LGH was originally formulated in the area of reading. The present study investigate its generalization toproductive language processes, i.e. writing. In this study participants copy-typed a comprehensible text, written in their nativelanguage, and an incomprehensible text, written in an unfamiliar language. The writing process was recorded via key-loggingand the time-series of inter-stroke-intervals was subjected to RQA. Results showed that comprehensible texts significantly in-creased the degree of structuredness of the writing process compared to incomprehensible texts. This suggests that meaningdoes indeed constrain language processes, and that this is the case for receptive and productive language tasks.