Word Ladders is a free mobile application for Android and iOS, developed for collecting linguistic data, specifically lists of words related to each other through semantic relations of categorical inclusion, within the Abstraction project (ERC-2021-STG-101039777). We hereby provide an overview of Word Ladders, explaining its game logic, motivation and expected results and applications to nlp tasks as well as to the investigation of cognitive scientific open questions.

Deaf studies scholar Naomi Caselli and a team of researchers found that American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are challenging to perceive -- those that are rare or have uncommon handshapes -- are made closer to the signer's face, where people often look during sign perception. By contrast, common ones, and those with more routine handshapes, are made further away from the face, in the perceiver's peripheral vision. Caselli, a Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development assistant professor, says the findings suggest that ASL has evolved to be easier for people to recognize signs. The results were published in Cognition. "Every time we use a word, it changes just a little bit," says Caselli, who's also codirector of the BU Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering's AI and Education Initiative.

The way we speak today isn't the way that people talked thousands -- or even hundreds -- of years ago. William Shakespeare's line, "to thine own self be true," is today's "be yourself." New speakers, ideas, and technologies all seem to play a role in shifting the ways we communicate with each other, but linguists don't always agree on how and why languages change. Now, a new study of American Sign Language adds support to one potential reason: sometimes, we just want to make our lives a little easier. Deaf studies scholar Naomi Caselli and a team of researchers found that American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are challenging to perceive -- those that are rare or have uncommon handshapes -- are made closer to the signer's face, where people often look during sign perception.