Francis Mollica
Biographic Data
| ID | 9496331 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francis Mollica |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francis |
| FAMILY NAME | Mollica |
| SIGNATURE | MOLLICA F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1008-5397 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 4 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 4 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special
When speakers refer to objects in the world, they frequently overinform. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, we hypothesise that overinformativeness is an efficient means of facilitating listener comprehension: speakers use redundancy to provide their listeners with search-efficient perceptual information. In Experiment One (N = 72), we operationalise search efficiency as the ease or difficulty of perceptual discrimination. We borrow m…
Logical word learning: The case of kinship
We examine the conceptual development of kinship through the lens of program induction. We present a computational model for the acquisition of kinship term concepts, resulting in the first computational model of kinship learning that is closely tied to developmental phenomena. We demonstrate that our model can learn several kinship systems of varying complexity using cross-linguistic data from English, Pukapuka, Turkish, and Yanomamö. More impor…
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language
Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features-including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization-relative to nine ot…
Contrast perception as a visual heuristic in the formulation of referential expressions
We hypothesize that contrast perception works as a visual heuristic, such that when speakers perceive a significant degree of contrast in a visual context, they tend to produce the corresponding adjective to describe a referent. The contrast perception heuristic supports efficient audience design, allowing speakers to produce referential expressions with minimum expenditure of cognitive resources, while facilitating the listener's visual search f…
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Contrast perception as a visual heuristic in the formulation of referential expressions
We hypothesize that contrast perception works as a visual heuristic, such that when speakers perceive a significant degree of contrast in a visual context, they tend to produce the corresponding adjective to describe a referent. The contrast perception heuristic supports efficient audience design, allowing speakers to produce referential expressions with minimum expenditure of cognitive resources, while facilitating the listener's visual search f…
Logical word learning: The case of kinship
We examine the conceptual development of kinship through the lens of program induction. We present a computational model for the acquisition of kinship term concepts, resulting in the first computational model of kinship learning that is closely tied to developmental phenomena. We demonstrate that our model can learn several kinship systems of varying complexity using cross-linguistic data from English, Pukapuka, Turkish, and Yanomamö. More impor…
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language
Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features-including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization-relative to nine ot…
Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special
When speakers refer to objects in the world, they frequently overinform. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, we hypothesise that overinformativeness is an efficient means of facilitating listener comprehension: speakers use redundancy to provide their listeners with search-efficient perceptual information. In Experiment One (N = 72), we operationalise search efficiency as the ease or difficulty of perceptual discrimination. We borrow m…
Artificial Intelligence (2 works) · Cognitive psychology (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (2 works) · Linguistics (2 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (2 works) · Psychology (2 works) · Appeal (1 works) · Artificial Intelligence (1 works) · Capitalization (1 works)