or concrete entities. I could also give a similar story-relative account of the issue as to whether fictional characters are individual versus general entities such as universals; here too I can simply reply that it depends on whether or not the relevant characters are represented as individuals or as universals, in the fictional story. 35. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, chap. 1. 36. That ...

Recurring traits across languages have been argued to relate directly to constraints imposed by the brain. A particular case is Greenberg's word order universals (Greenberg 1966), which have been argued to reflect the demands of language acquisition (Baker 2001, Chomsky 2010) or of processing sentences (Hawkins 1983, Kirby and Hurford 1997). This paper argues that typological universals are ind...

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, w...

In the sound systems of human languages remarkable universals are found. These universals can be explained by innate mechanisms, or by their function in human speech. This paper presents a functional explanation of certain universals of vowel systems using Alife-techniques. It is based on language-like interactions between members of a population of individual agents. The agents start out empty...

We broaden the developmental focus of the theory of universals in basic human values (Schwartz, 1992, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology) by presenting supportive evidence on children's values from six countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, the United States, and New Zealand. 3,088 7-11-year-old children completed the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C, Döring et al.,...

With data from 10 different globalized cultures and 1 remote, isolated village in Bhutan, we examined universals and cultural variations in the recognition of 16 nonverbal emotional vocalizations. College students in 10 nations (Study 1) and villagers in remote Bhutan (Study 2) were asked to match emotional vocalizations to 1-sentence stories of the same valence. Guided by previous conceptualiz...

Human performance defines the standard that machine learning systems aspire to in many areas, including learning language. This suggests that studying human cognition may be a good way to develop better learning algorithms, as well as providing basic insights into how the human mind works. However, in order for ideas to flow easily from cognitive science to computer science and vice versa, we n...

Spatial cognition is central to human thinking, and spatial language is thus an important area of study, as it may reveal fundamental properties of human thought. Recent research reveals that spatial language is much more divergent across languages than had been thought, suggesting significant cultural patterning of spatial conceptualization. Space can be treated as a complex semantic field wit...

Knowledge of color has strong individual, environmental, and cultural differences that may systematically influence performance in cognitive tasks. For example, color knowledge has been shown to influence recall of color (Persaud & Hemmer, 2014). This manifests as a systematic regression to the mean effect, where memory is biased towards the mean hue of each universal color category. What remai...