Dagmar Divjak
Biographic Data
| ID | 966065 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dagmar Divjak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dagmar |
| FAMILY NAME | Divjak |
| SIGNATURE | DIVJAK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6825-8508 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The synergy of linguistic theories and models of learning
Emergence is a key concept in usage-based linguistic theories, which view natural languages as complex systems learned through exposure to usage, by relying on general cognitive functions rather than an innate language faculty and its underlying universal grammar posited by generativist theories. Despite its importance, however, the emergence of language knowledge has often been treated axiomatically rather than being empirically substantiated. W…
L1 listeners’ evaluations of LX speech: The role of listener expectations and personality traits
LX speech tends to receive less favourable judgments, which can be attributed to its non-standard linguistic properties (e.g. foreign accents, grammatical errors). However, the evaluations of LX speech could also be affected by listeners’ expectations and their individual differences. This study extends research on the role of listeners’ expectations (cued by speech accent) and personality traits (Big Five), by examining the degree to which and h…
Optimising participant grouping methods in bilingualism studies: Insights from eye-tracking data
This research addresses two major challenges in studying second language acquisition and bilingualism: reducing overlap in predictor variables and correctly classifying participants into language proficiency levels. Too many relevant predictors can harm statistical analysis due to an increased chance of overlap, known as multicollinearity. To tackle this, we use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on selected predictors to identify proficiency ind…
Bilingual acquisition during school years: Predictors of achievement in the societal and heritage language
There are vast individual differences in heritage bilinguals' linguistic skills. It is not clear, however, to what extent this variation can be attributed to experience, cognitive ability or motivation. This study investigates factors influencing the acquisition of both Polish (HL = Heritage Language) and English (SocL = Societal Language) of school-age children, examining the role of motivation, linguistic experience, and language aptitude. We c…
Error Correction Learning of Second Language Verbal Morphology: Associating Imperfect Contingencies in Naturalistic Frequency Distributions
We investigate what is learned from exposure to usage in verbal morphology using an error correction mechanism within an associative learning framework. We computationally simulated how second language (L2) learners would respond to naturalistic input of aspectual usage, characterized by "imperfect contingencies," given two types of instructions: grammatical versus lexical. To test these predictions, English native speakers (N = 80) completed thr…
Order Effects in Second Language Learning
We explore how general principles of learning apply to and combine with usage-based approaches to language learning and teaching, with a focus on the effects of order of exposure to new information in second language (L2) instruction. Although the effects of input spacing and timing on memory and learning have been previously explored (see Rogers, 2020; Shintani, 2017, for an overview), the effects of order of exposure to the input remain underst…
Ruled by construal: Framing article choice in English
In cognitive linguistics, grammatical structure is known to be representative of meaning. This is also true of English articles. In this paper, we argue that the choice of article, when the grammar allows it, is dependent on the wider discourse context and most importantly on how the speaker construes this context. Using survey data from 181 native speakers of English, we show that the choice of article depends on the activation of semantic frame…
On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: Verbal Aspect Through the Lens of Associative Learning
The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we p…
Error-Correction Mechanisms in Language Learning: Modeling Individuals
Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of participants across a range of tasks, we focus on testing predictions generated by the model in a controlle…
A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions: The curious case of phone(me)s
In this study, we propose an operationalization of the concept of emergence which plays a crucial role in usage-based theories of language. The abstractions linguists operate with are assumed to emerge through a process of generalization over the data language users are exposed to. Here, we use two types of computational learning algorithms that differ in how they formalize and execute generalization and, consequently, abstraction, to probe wheth…
From their point of view: The Article Category as a Hierarchically Structured Referent Tracking System
Full-fledged grammatical article systems as attested in Germanic and Romance languages are rather uncommon from a typological perspective. The frequency with which articles occur in these languages, together with the difficulty encountered in detecting them and the lack of a water-tight account of article use, make article errors one of the most frequent errors in language produced by L2 learners whose L1 does not feature an article system of sim…
Frogs, apples, and sand: Effects of cognitive and demographic factors on letter fluency performance
Introduction to the Special Issue
What makes the past perfect and the future progressive? Experiential coordinates for a learnable, context-based model of tense and aspect
We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect (TA) combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language…
Frequency in Language: Memory, Attention and Learning
Cognitive linguists are bound by the cognitive commitment, which is the commitment to providing a characterization of the general principles governing all aspects of human language, in a way that is informed by, and accords with, what is known about the brain and mind from other disciplines. But what do we know about aspects of cognition that are relevant for theories of language? Which insights can help us build cognitive reality into our descri…
Construal in language: A visual-world approach to the effects of linguistic alternations on event perception and conception
The theoretical notion of ‘construal’ captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception – which conjoins conception and perception – we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting event conception. By analysing viewing behaviour after alt…
Towards cognitively plausible data science in language research
Over the past 10 years, Cognitive Linguistics has taken a quantitative turn. Yet, concerns have been raised that this preoccupation with quantification and modelling may not bring us any closer to understanding how language works. We show that this objection is unfounded, especially if we rely on modelling techniques based on biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithms. These make it possible to take a quantitative approach, wh…
Cognitive Linguistics: Looking back, looking forward”
Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspect…
Machine Meets Man: Evaluating the Psychological Reality of Corpus-based Probabilistic Models
Linguistic convention typically allows speakers several options. Evidence is accumulating that the various options are preferred in different contexts, yet the criteria governing the selection of the appropriate form are often far from obvious. Most researchers who attempt to discover the factors determining a preference rely on the linguistic analysis and statistical modeling of data extracted from large corpora. In this paper, we address the qu…
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on the assumptions that our linguistic abilities are firmly rooted in our cognitive abilities, that meaning is essentially conceptualization, and that grammar is shaped by usage. The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides state-of-the-art overviews of the numerous subfields of cognitive linguistics written by leading international experts which will be useful for established researc…
Exploring the grammar of perception: A case study using data from Russian
In this paper, I pursue the distributional hypothesis that the meaning of a word is derived from the linguistic contexts in which it occurs and apply it to verbs of perception. Differently from NLP implementations of the distributional hypothesis, I explicitly limit the range of variables to the grammatical domain and chart the way in which verbs of Vision, Hearing and Touch are used, morphologically and syntactically, in a representative sample …
Less is more: Possibility and necessity as centres of gravity in a usage-based classification of core modals in Polish
Extracting prototypes from exemplars What can corpus data tell us about concept representation
Over the past four decades, two distinct alternatives have emerged to rule-based models of how linguistic categories are stored and represented as cognitive structures, namely the prototype and exemplar theories. Although these models were initially thought to be mutually exclusive, shifts from one mechanism to the other have been observed in category learning experiments, bringing the models closer together. In this paper we implement a techniqu…
Mapping between domains. The aspect–modality interaction in Russian
Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain
Machine Meets Man: Evaluating the Psychological Reality of Corpus-based Probabilistic Models
Linguistic convention typically allows speakers several options. Evidence is accumulating that the various options are preferred in different contexts, yet the criteria governing the selection of the appropriate form are often far from obvious. Most researchers who attempt to discover the factors determining a preference rely on the linguistic analysis and statistical modeling of data extracted from large corpora. In this paper, we address the qu…
Extracting prototypes from exemplars What can corpus data tell us about concept representation
Over the past four decades, two distinct alternatives have emerged to rule-based models of how linguistic categories are stored and represented as cognitive structures, namely the prototype and exemplar theories. Although these models were initially thought to be mutually exclusive, shifts from one mechanism to the other have been observed in category learning experiments, bringing the models closer together. In this paper we implement a techniqu…
Degrees of clause integration: From endotactic to exotactic subordination in Dutch
This article presents a fine-grained syntactic categorization of Dutch subordinating conjunctions, both simple and phrasal. By means of a hierarchical set of formal criteria, this article provides a detailed description of the syntactic behavior of 87 conjunctions with a total of 154 different readings. These formal criteria test the degree of dependence on the main clause predicator. The presence or absence of proportionality with paradigms of p…
What makes the past perfect and the future progressive? Experiential coordinates for a learnable, context-based model of tense and aspect
We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect (TA) combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language…
On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: Verbal Aspect Through the Lens of Associative Learning
The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we p…
Error-Correction Mechanisms in Language Learning: Modeling Individuals
Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of participants across a range of tasks, we focus on testing predictions generated by the model in a controlle…
From their point of view: The Article Category as a Hierarchically Structured Referent Tracking System
Full-fledged grammatical article systems as attested in Germanic and Romance languages are rather uncommon from a typological perspective. The frequency with which articles occur in these languages, together with the difficulty encountered in detecting them and the lack of a water-tight account of article use, make article errors one of the most frequent errors in language produced by L2 learners whose L1 does not feature an article system of sim…
Construal in language: A visual-world approach to the effects of linguistic alternations on event perception and conception
The theoretical notion of ‘construal’ captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception – which conjoins conception and perception – we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting event conception. By analysing viewing behaviour after alt…
Towards cognitively plausible data science in language research
Over the past 10 years, Cognitive Linguistics has taken a quantitative turn. Yet, concerns have been raised that this preoccupation with quantification and modelling may not bring us any closer to understanding how language works. We show that this objection is unfounded, especially if we rely on modelling techniques based on biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithms. These make it possible to take a quantitative approach, wh…
Cognitive Linguistics: Looking back, looking forward”
Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspect…
Order Effects in Second Language Learning
We explore how general principles of learning apply to and combine with usage-based approaches to language learning and teaching, with a focus on the effects of order of exposure to new information in second language (L2) instruction. Although the effects of input spacing and timing on memory and learning have been previously explored (see Rogers, 2020; Shintani, 2017, for an overview), the effects of order of exposure to the input remain underst…
Degrees of clause integration: From endotactic to exotactic subordination in Dutch
This article presents a fine-grained syntactic categorization of Dutch subordinating conjunctions, both simple and phrasal. By means of a hierarchical set of formal criteria, this article provides a detailed description of the syntactic behavior of 87 conjunctions with a total of 154 different readings. These formal criteria test the degree of dependence on the main clause predicator. The presence or absence of proportionality with paradigms of p…
Cognitive paths into the Slavic domain
Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain
Mapping between domains. The aspect–modality interaction in Russian
Extracting prototypes from exemplars What can corpus data tell us about concept representation
Over the past four decades, two distinct alternatives have emerged to rule-based models of how linguistic categories are stored and represented as cognitive structures, namely the prototype and exemplar theories. Although these models were initially thought to be mutually exclusive, shifts from one mechanism to the other have been observed in category learning experiments, bringing the models closer together. In this paper we implement a techniqu…
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on the assumptions that our linguistic abilities are firmly rooted in our cognitive abilities, that meaning is essentially conceptualization, and that grammar is shaped by usage. The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides state-of-the-art overviews of the numerous subfields of cognitive linguistics written by leading international experts which will be useful for established researc…
Exploring the grammar of perception: A case study using data from Russian
In this paper, I pursue the distributional hypothesis that the meaning of a word is derived from the linguistic contexts in which it occurs and apply it to verbs of perception. Differently from NLP implementations of the distributional hypothesis, I explicitly limit the range of variables to the grammatical domain and chart the way in which verbs of Vision, Hearing and Touch are used, morphologically and syntactically, in a representative sample …
Less is more: Possibility and necessity as centres of gravity in a usage-based classification of core modals in Polish
Towards cognitively plausible data science in language research
Over the past 10 years, Cognitive Linguistics has taken a quantitative turn. Yet, concerns have been raised that this preoccupation with quantification and modelling may not bring us any closer to understanding how language works. We show that this objection is unfounded, especially if we rely on modelling techniques based on biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithms. These make it possible to take a quantitative approach, wh…
Cognitive Linguistics: Looking back, looking forward”
Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspect…
Machine Meets Man: Evaluating the Psychological Reality of Corpus-based Probabilistic Models
Linguistic convention typically allows speakers several options. Evidence is accumulating that the various options are preferred in different contexts, yet the criteria governing the selection of the appropriate form are often far from obvious. Most researchers who attempt to discover the factors determining a preference rely on the linguistic analysis and statistical modeling of data extracted from large corpora. In this paper, we address the qu…
Frequency in Language: Memory, Attention and Learning
Cognitive linguists are bound by the cognitive commitment, which is the commitment to providing a characterization of the general principles governing all aspects of human language, in a way that is informed by, and accords with, what is known about the brain and mind from other disciplines. But what do we know about aspects of cognition that are relevant for theories of language? Which insights can help us build cognitive reality into our descri…
Construal in language: A visual-world approach to the effects of linguistic alternations on event perception and conception
The theoretical notion of ‘construal’ captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception – which conjoins conception and perception – we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting event conception. By analysing viewing behaviour after alt…
Frogs, apples, and sand: Effects of cognitive and demographic factors on letter fluency performance
Introduction to the Special Issue
What makes the past perfect and the future progressive? Experiential coordinates for a learnable, context-based model of tense and aspect
We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect (TA) combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language…
A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions: The curious case of phone(me)s
In this study, we propose an operationalization of the concept of emergence which plays a crucial role in usage-based theories of language. The abstractions linguists operate with are assumed to emerge through a process of generalization over the data language users are exposed to. Here, we use two types of computational learning algorithms that differ in how they formalize and execute generalization and, consequently, abstraction, to probe wheth…
From their point of view: The Article Category as a Hierarchically Structured Referent Tracking System
Full-fledged grammatical article systems as attested in Germanic and Romance languages are rather uncommon from a typological perspective. The frequency with which articles occur in these languages, together with the difficulty encountered in detecting them and the lack of a water-tight account of article use, make article errors one of the most frequent errors in language produced by L2 learners whose L1 does not feature an article system of sim…
Ruled by construal: Framing article choice in English
In cognitive linguistics, grammatical structure is known to be representative of meaning. This is also true of English articles. In this paper, we argue that the choice of article, when the grammar allows it, is dependent on the wider discourse context and most importantly on how the speaker construes this context. Using survey data from 181 native speakers of English, we show that the choice of article depends on the activation of semantic frame…
On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: Verbal Aspect Through the Lens of Associative Learning
The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we p…
Error-Correction Mechanisms in Language Learning: Modeling Individuals
Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of participants across a range of tasks, we focus on testing predictions generated by the model in a controlle…
Optimising participant grouping methods in bilingualism studies: Insights from eye-tracking data
This research addresses two major challenges in studying second language acquisition and bilingualism: reducing overlap in predictor variables and correctly classifying participants into language proficiency levels. Too many relevant predictors can harm statistical analysis due to an increased chance of overlap, known as multicollinearity. To tackle this, we use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on selected predictors to identify proficiency ind…
Bilingual acquisition during school years: Predictors of achievement in the societal and heritage language
There are vast individual differences in heritage bilinguals' linguistic skills. It is not clear, however, to what extent this variation can be attributed to experience, cognitive ability or motivation. This study investigates factors influencing the acquisition of both Polish (HL = Heritage Language) and English (SocL = Societal Language) of school-age children, examining the role of motivation, linguistic experience, and language aptitude. We c…
Error Correction Learning of Second Language Verbal Morphology: Associating Imperfect Contingencies in Naturalistic Frequency Distributions
We investigate what is learned from exposure to usage in verbal morphology using an error correction mechanism within an associative learning framework. We computationally simulated how second language (L2) learners would respond to naturalistic input of aspectual usage, characterized by "imperfect contingencies," given two types of instructions: grammatical versus lexical. To test these predictions, English native speakers (N = 80) completed thr…
Order Effects in Second Language Learning
We explore how general principles of learning apply to and combine with usage-based approaches to language learning and teaching, with a focus on the effects of order of exposure to new information in second language (L2) instruction. Although the effects of input spacing and timing on memory and learning have been previously explored (see Rogers, 2020; Shintani, 2017, for an overview), the effects of order of exposure to the input remain underst…
Linguistics (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Artificial Intelligence (11 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (9 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Cognitive science (7 works)