Compositionality, the ability to flexibly combine meaningful words into higher-level representations, is a critical feature of human language. However, the evolutionary origins of compositional processing are unclear, and evidence for this ability in nonhuman primates is largely lacking. Compositionality is inherent in processing negative clauses, such as ‘not red’. Here, we conducted a series of three experiments using a novel, nonlinguistic ‘negation’ paradigm, which provide evidence of compositional processing in nonhuman primates. Macaques learned to associate an abstract visual stimulus with the process of negation (i.e., ‘not’), and to combine this compositionally with novel images (e.g., a dog) on a trial-by-trial basis (i.e., to select a stimulus that was not a dog). Our results suggest compositional processing in monkeys, raising the possibility that the core of this language-critical ability may be present in monkeys, and thus may not be unique to humans or to language.
Angelle Antoun, Rohini Murugan, Kathleen J. Bostick et al.· Cognition· 0 citations
In language, word order can be used to help disambiguate the grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) to which an unfamiliar or ambiguous word belongs. We have recently demonstrated that the order of stimuli impacts how ambiguous stimuli are subsequently categorized, even in a nonlinguistic context. However, it remains possible that participants may linguistically recode these stimuli (i.e., giving abstract shapes ‘names’), such that this effect is still based in the language system. Here, we adapted our previous non-linguistic paradigm assessing the impact of sequence order on categorization, but with the addition of two interference conditions: one interfering with phonological systems of linguistic re-coding, and the other with visuospatial memory. We found that while the non-linguistic, visuospatial interference task had no impact on the sequence categorization effect, the linguistic interference task substantially reduced this effect. These results suggest that even though the task uses nonlinguistic stimuli, participants appeared to recode this information linguistically, and thus that this effect may be a feature of language, rather than a more domain-general cognitive process.
Angelle Antoun, Jacqueline Zhang, Fei Xu et al.· Journal of experimental psyc...· 0 citations
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