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July 2019 - present
August 2017 - June 2019
August 2015 - May 2017
Education
August 2012 - June 2017
Publications
Publications (68)
Network science provides a set of quantitative methods to investigate complex systems, including human cognition. Although cognitive theories in different domains are strongly based on a network perspective, the application of network science methodologies to quantitatively study cognition has so far been limited in scope. This review demonstrates...
Years of research has shown that children do not learn words at random, but in distinct patterns. Why do we observe the patterns that we do? By using network science and investigating the words that children don’t learn, researchers have potentially uncovered a general property of word learning as a process of gap forming and filling. © 2018, The P...
Network science has been applied to study the structure of the mental lexicon, the part of long-term memory where all the words a person knows are stored. Here the tools of network science are used to study the organization of orthographic word-forms in the mental lexicon and how that might influence visual word recognition. An orthographic similar...
Community structure, which refers to the presence of densely connected groups within a larger network, is a common feature of several real-world networks from a variety of domains such as the human brain, social networks of hunter-gatherers and business organizations, and the World Wide Web (Porter et al., 2009). Using a community detection techniq...
Network science uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems such as the phonological lexicon (Vitevitch, 2008). The phonological network consists of a giant component (the largest connected component of the network) and lexical islands (smaller groups of words that are connected to each other, but not to the giant component). To determine...
Singapore English is a dialect of English spoken by individuals living in Singapore, whose colloquial form (i.e., Singapore Colloquial English) contains unique lexical items not found in dominant dialects of English. The absence of these items from the lexicon of dominant English dialects indicates that lexical-semantic norms central to psycholingu...
Cette introduction au numéro spécial intitulé Network Science in Experimental Psychology explique comment les psychologues expérimentaux utilisent les réseaux complexes pour examiner des questions relevant d’un large éventail de sujets en psychologie. Les réseaux complexes emploient des nœuds pour représenter les entités individuelles et des connex...
Understanding attitudes towards STEM means quantifying the cognitive and emotional ways in which individuals, and potentially large language models too, conceptualise such subjects. This study uses behavioural forma mentis networks (BFMNs) to investigate the STEM-focused mindset, i.e. ways of associating and perceiving ideas, of 177 human participa...
Des milliers de formes phonologiques de mots connues d’un locuteur peuvent être organisées comme un réseau lexical en utilisant les outils de la science des réseaux. Dans ces réseaux, les nœuds représentent les mots et les arêtes sont placées entre les voisins phonologiques. Des travaux antérieurs ont montré que les réseaux phonologiques de différe...
Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meaning...
Large-scale collection of lexical-semantic norms for words in a given language has been instrumental in the progress of psycholinguistic research. However, such norms tend to be collected from speakers of the dominant variant or dialect. This research aims to determine if there may be differences across speakers of various dialects of English in th...
We report data from the Small World of Singlish Words (SWOSW) Project, where word associations are obtained for a list of common Singlish words. Singapore English, colloquially known as Singlish, is a dialect of English spoken in Singapore. Free association data on these words were collected from a young adult population of university undergraduate...
Background: Phonological similarity judgments of word-pairs have been shown to reflect the structure of a phonological network of word-forms, where words are connected to each other if they differ by one phoneme. Word-pairs that are closer together in the pho-nological network are more likely to be rated as sounding similar than word-pairs that are...
Human memory is a complex system that works in associative ways: Reading a cue word can lead to the recollection of associated concepts. The network structure of memory recall patterns has been shown to contain insights about a wide variety of cognitive phenomena, including language acquisition. However, most current network approaches use pairwise...
Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken...
Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken...
Like biological species, competition for survival is a constant among words in language. Previously, it has been shown that language evolves in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how survival of words can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties...
Objective:
As network models of eating disorder (ED) psychopathology become increasingly popular in modeling symptom interconnectedness and identifying potential treatment targets, it is necessary to contextualize their performance against other methods of modeling ED psychopathology and to evaluate potential ways to optimize and capitalize on the...
The structure of knowledge is commonly described as a network of key concepts and semantic relations between them. A learner of a particular domain can discover this network by navigating the nodes and edges presented by instructional material, such as a textbook, workbook, or other text. While over a long temporal period such exploration processes...
Language endangerment is one of the most urgent issues of the twenty-first century. Languages are disappearing at unprecedented rates, with dire consequences that affect speaker communities, scientific community and humanity. There is impetus for understanding the nature of language endangerment, and we investigate where language endangerment occur...
While it has long been understood that the human mind evolved to learn language, recent studies have begun to ask the inverted question: How has language evolved under the cognitive constraints of its users and become more learnable over time? In this paper, we explored how the semantic change of English words is shaped by the way humans acquire an...
Cognitive scientists have a long-standing interest in quantifying the structure of semantic memory. Here, we investigate whether a commonly used paradigm to study the structure of semantic memory, the semantic fluency task, as well as computational methods from network science could be leveraged to explore the underlying knowledge structures of aca...
How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local contex...
How does the relation between two words create humor? In this paper, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local context...
Various aspects of semantic features drive early vocabulary development, but less is known about how the global and local structure of the overall semantic feature space influences language acquisition. A feature network of English words was constructed from a large database of adult feature production norms such that edges in the network represent...
Recent work investigating the development of the phonological lexicon, where edges between words represent phonological similarity, have suggested that phonological network growth may be partly driven by a process that favors the acquisition of new words that are phonologically similar to several existing words in the lexicon. To explore this growt...
The Korean writing system, Hangul, is an alphabetic syllabary which permits a unique opportunity to investigate how both the syllabic and letter similarity structure of the Korean mental lexicon influences lexical processing. We capitalized on the availability of lexical decision behavioral data for thousands of Korean words, and the tools of netwo...
It has long been understood that the mind has evolved to learn language. Recently this claim has been inverted to question how language evolves to become learnable. However, there is little evidence on how semantic evolution is shaped by language acquisition and processing in a naturally occurring language. In this research, we provide evidence to...
Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental...
This paper investigated how network growth algorithms—preferential attachment, preferential acquisition, and lure of the associates—relate to the acquisition of words in the phonological language network, where edges are placed between words that are phonologically similar to each other. Through an archival analysis of age-of-acquisition norms from...
This article investigated how network growth algorithms—preferential attachment, preferential acquisition, and lure of the associates—relate to the acquisition of words in the phonological language network, where edges are placed between words that are phonologically similar to each other. Through an archival analysis of age-of-acquisition norms fr...
Modelling the structure of cognitive systems is a central goal of the cognitive sciences-a goal that has greatly benefitted from the application of network science approaches. This paper provides an overview of how network science has been applied to the cognitive sciences, with a specific focus on the two research 'spirals' of cognitive sciences r...
A fundamental goal of education is to inspire and instill deep, meaningful, and long-lasting conceptual change within the knowledge landscapes of students. This commentary posits that the tools of network science could be useful in helping educators achieve this goal in two ways. First, methods from cognitive psychology and network science could be...
This is the first study to demonstrate interpersonal difficulties associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD) features in the domain of social media. Using crowdsourcing, we presented participants with a battery of questions about their recent social media use, and then assessed their BPD features using the short form of the Five-Factor B...
Semantic features are central to many influential theories of word meaning and semantic memory, but new methods of quantifying the information embedded in feature production norms are needed to advance our understanding of semantic processing and language acquisition. This paper capitalized on databases of semantic feature production norms and age-...
Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we utilized a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the men...
Modelling the structure of cognitive systems is a central goal of the cognitive sciences—a goal that has greatly benefitted from the application of network science approaches. This paper provides an overview of how network science has been applied to the cognitive sciences, with a specific focus on the two research “spirals” of cognitive sciences r...
In order to investigate how high school students and researchers perceive science-related (STEM) subjects, we introduce forma mentis networks. This framework models how people conceptually structure their stance, mindset or forma mentis toward a given topic. In this study, we build forma mentis networks revolving around STEM and based on psycholing...
Objective:
Although men comprise 25% of persons with eating disorders (EDs), most research has focused on understanding EDs in women. The theoretical framework underlying common ED treatment has not been rigorously tested in men. The purpose of this study was to compare the interconnectivity among ED symptoms in men versus women.
Method:
Partici...
Network science provides a set of quantitative methods to investigate complex systems, including human cognition. Although cognitive theories in different domains are strongly based on a network perspective, the application of network science methodologies to quantitatively study cognition has so far been limited in scope. This review demonstrates...
Semantic features are central to many influential theories of word meaning and semantic memory, but new methods of quantifying the information embedded in feature production norms are needed to advance our understanding of semantic processing and language acquisition. This paper capitalized on databases of semantic feature production norms and age-...
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, incl...
Background:
Understanding the characteristics of commenters on mental health-related online forums is vital for the development of effective psychological interventions in these communities. The way in which commenters interact can enhance our understanding of their characteristics.
Objective:
Using eating disorder-related (EDR) forums as an exa...
Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition and phonological effects in visual word recognition have been observed in a variety of experimental tasks, strongly suggesting that a close interrelationship exists between phonology and orthography. However, the metrics used to investigate these effects, such as consistency and neighborhood size, fai...
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, incl...
In order to investigate the stances of high school students and researchers toward STEM subjects, we introduce the methodology of forma mentis networks -- free association networks enriched with affective attributes that represent how people conceptually perceive and structure their stance toward a given topic. In this paper, we constructed separat...
The notion of spreading activation is a central theme in the cognitive sciences; however, the tools for implementing spreading activation computationally are not as readily available. This article introduces the spreadr R package, which can implement spreading activation within a specified network structure. The algorithmic method implemented in th...
The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth disparity, and war. Here we make available a tool, the M...
Many psychology students experience statistics anxiety, which negatively affects academic performance and necessitates the application of new methods to understand the underlying nature of statistics anxiety. In the present analysis we use the tools of network science, a set of mathematical techniques to examine the relationships between entities i...
BACKGROUND
Understanding the characteristics of commenters on mental health-related online discussion forums is vital for the development of effective psychological interventions in these communities. Previous research has typically investigated these characteristics using surveys or textual analyses of online content. However, the way in which com...
Purpose:
Network science uses mathematical and computational techniques to examine how individual entities in a system, represented by nodes, interact, as represented by connections between nodes. This approach has been used by Cramer et al. (2010) to make "symptom networks" to examine various psychological disorders. In the present analysis we ex...
Background:
Traditional approaches for the classification of eating disorders (EDs) attribute symptoms to an underlying, latent disease entity. The network approach is an alternative model in which mental disorders are represented as networks of interacting, self-reinforcing symptoms. This project was the first to use network analysis to identify...
The influence of 2-hop density on spoken word recognition was investigated. 2-hop density measures the density of connections among the phonological neighbors (i.e., 1-hop neighbors) and phonological neighbors of those neighbors (i.e., 2-hop neighbors) of a target word. In both naming and lexical decision tasks, words with low 2-hop density were re...
Much previous research has examined various aspects of auditory processing, including the localization of sounds, and the influence of lexical and indexical information on language processing. In the present set of experiments we explored the ability of listeners to estimate the number of speakers in a group solely from the information in an audito...
Collections of various types of speech errors have increased our understanding of the acquisition, production, and perception of language. Although such collections of naturally occurring language errors are invaluable for a number of reasons, the process of collecting various types of speech errors presents many challenges to the researcher intere...
Network science is an emerging discipline drawing from sociology, computer science, physics and a number of other fields to examine complex systems in economical, biological, social, and technological domains. To examine these complex systems, nodes are used to represent individual entities, and links are used to represent relationships between ent...
Network science is a field that applies mathematical techniques to study complex systems, and the tools of network science have been used to analyze the phonological network of language (Vitevitch, 2008). The phonological network consists of a giant component, lexical islands, and several hermits. The giant component represents the largest connecte...
The present study aims to isolate the locus of the frequency effect within the spoken word recognition architecture. By applying the additive factors logic (Sternberg, 1969) to an auditory lexical decision task where both word frequency and stimulus quality were factorially manipulated, the reaction time data can be analyzed to study processing sta...
The present study aims to isolate the locus of the frequency effect within the spoken word recognition architecture. By applying the additive factors logic (Sternberg, 1969) to an auditory lexical decision task where both word frequency and stimulus quality were factorially manipulated, the reaction time data can be analyzed to study processing sta...
