Many studies have drawn conclusions that in English word recognition, native adult speakers tend to adopt the holistic processing strategy and a switch from analytic processing strategy to holistic one among children was also detected. Considering the huge differences between logographic Chinese characters and alphabetical English series of letters, it would be interesting to discuss – How does the Chinese native speakers process Chinese characters?

Research on meditation has been rising in the past decades. Mindfulness interventions have been applied to new settings such as schools, workplaces and military. Research studies claim that meditation leads to cognitive enhancement and helps with psychotic disorders. Studies support underlying cognitive benefits such as improved visual search, inhibitory control, executive control, meta-awareness, sustained attention and decrease in mind-wandering. Yet, these interventions can trigger benign and adverse effects based on psychological history of individuals.

In this paper, we describe an approach for modelling causal reasoning in natural language by detecting counterfactuals in text using multi-head self-attention weights. We use pre-trained transformer models to extract contextual embeddings and self-attention weights from the text. We show the use of convolutional layers to extract task-specific features from these self-attention weights. Further, we describe a fine-tuning approach with a common base model for knowledge sharing between the two closely related sub-tasks for counterfactual detection.

Bilinguals show a robust adaptive behaviour when it comes to the selection of a language in real-world interactional context (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). Studies suggest that proficient bilinguals exploit linguistic and non-linguistic visual cues to select one language between two in a context-dependent manner (Hartsuiker, 2015).

 I will be presenting the paper by Perez et al. (2019), which has studied neural coupling during native and non-native language conversations. I will also briefly refer to Pliatsikas et al.'s (2019) review paper proposing to further concentrate on language background when carrying out bilingualism research. The Perez paper uses the method of hyperscanning to discuss how linguistic context should be considered when studying interpersonal communication. 

The relevant paper explores the relationship between various cognitive functions and the generation of novel as well as conventional metaphors. The results show that only selective attention plays a major role in conventional metaphor generation, whereas novel metaphor generation relies on  other cognitive functions. I will discuss the findings of this paper in light of the current knowledge on relevant topics.