In this series of experiments, we assess whether an effect that is typically studied in the context of letter and word visual identification -- and sometimes taken as a marker for orthographic processing -- that is, bigram coding, also applies to other types of visual objects. Subjects were passively familiarized with a set of composite visual items and tested in an oddball paradigm for their ability to detect novel stimuli. Participants showed robust sensitivity to the co-occurrence of features (‘‘bigram’’ coding) with strings of letter-like symbols, but also with made-up 3D objects and sinusoidal gratings. This suggests that the processing mechanisms involved in the visual recognition of novel words also support the recognition of other novel visual objects. These mechanisms would allow the visual system to capture statistical regularities in the visual environment.

The paper is published in Current Biology. A pre-print is also available on biorXiv, while you should click on the title to get an author-formatted post-print.

In this short commentary, we contest the possibility that the distribution of Number values in natural languages is economically explained as consequence of cultural factors, as proposed by Everett (2019). We discuss in favor of a in interplay of referential, cognitive and communicative pressures, related to the core knowledge and to general properties of codes; we wish that our proposal can a first step to operationalize further experimental questions targeting each of these levels.
 

Language encodes into morphology part of the information present in the referential world. Some features are marked in the great majority of languages, such as the numerosity of the referents that is encoded in morphological Number. Other features do not surface as frequently in morphological markings, yet they are pervasive in natural languages. This is the case of animacy, that can ground Gender systems as well as constrain the surfacing of Number. The diffusion of numerosity and animacy could mirror their biological salience at the extra-linguistic cognitive level.

Here we show (see also Marelli et al., QJEP 2015; Amenta et al., PBR 2017; and Marelli and Amenta, BRM 2018) how the reading/language system is sensitive to islands of (probabilistic) regularity in the mapping between form and language. In particular, we show how this qualifies priming patterns, both morphological and semantic, masked and overt. Paper available here. [Read more by clicking on the title.]