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Multimodal training on L2 Japanese pitch accent: learning outcomes, neural correlates and subjective assessments Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Yukari Hirata, Erica Friedman, Caroline Kaicher, Spencer D. Kelly
Japanese pitch accent is phonemic, making it crucial for second-language learners to acquire. Building on theories of multimodal learning, the present study explored how auditory, visual and gestural training of Japanese pitch accent affected behavioral, neural and meta-cognitive aspects of pitch perception across two experiments. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects pre/posttest design to train native
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Head metonymies and metaphors in Jordanian and Tunisian Arabic: an extended conceptual metaphor theory perspective Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Aseel Zibin, Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh, Ola Musmar
This study aims to explore the target concepts of metonymical and metaphorical uses of ‘head’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA) compared to those used in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) as envisaged by Kövecses (2020, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 18, 112–-130) is adopted as the theoretical framework. Data analysis reveals that through metonymic metaphors, the head in JA
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Facial expressions in different communication settings: A case of whispering and speaking with a face mask in Farsi Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Nasim Mahdinazhad Sardhaei, Marzena Żygis, Hamid Sharifzadeh
This study addresses the importance of orofacial gestures and acoustic cues to execute prosodic patterns under different communicative settings in Farsi. Given that Farsi lacks morpho-syntactic markers for polar questions, we aim to determine whether specific facial movements accompany the prosodic correlates of questionhood in Farsi under conditions of degraded information, that is, whispering and
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The effect of emotional prosody and referent characteristics on novel noun learning Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Melissa K. Jungers, Julie M. Hupp, Jarrett A. Rardon, Samantha A. McDonald, Yujin Song
Prosody includes the pitch, timing and loudness in speech, which can convey meaning and emotion. This study examines whether prosodic categories affect novel noun learning and whether the referent characteristic influence learning. Previous research showed that emotional prosody interfered with adults’ noun learning (West et al., 2017), but it had no effect on children (West et al., 2022). However
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Inherent linguistic preference outcompetes incidental alignment in cooperative partner choice Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-24 Theresa Matzinger, Marek Placiński, Adam Gutowski, Mariusz Lewandowski, Przemysław Żywiczyński, Sławomir Wacewicz
An important quality to assess in others is their cooperativeness. We hypothesized that people use linguistic markers in their partners’ speech as a proxy of their cooperativeness in other tasks: specifically, we predicted that participants would prefer syntactically similar conversation partners as cooperation partners in a monetary game. We found that, indeed, participants preferably selected syntactically
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The ambiguous nature of complex semantic types: an experimental investigation Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-17 Richard Huyghe, Lucie Barque, François Delafontaine, Justine Salvadori
Words with complex semantic types such as book are characterised by a multiplicity of interpretations that are not mutually exclusive (e.g., as a physical object and/or informational content). Their status with respect to lexical ambiguity is notoriously unclear, and it is debatable whether complex types are a particular form of polysemy (closely related to metonymy) or whether they belong to monosemy
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Neurological evidence for the context-independent multisensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: an fNIRS study in the Ecuadorian Amazon Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Dan P. Dewey, Jeffrey J. Green, Janis Nuckolls, Auna Nygaard, Todd D. Swanson
Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking
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‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-30 Simon Harrison
Movement scientists have proposed to ground the relation between prosody and gesture in ‘vocal-entangled gestures’, defined as biomechanical linkages between upper limb movement and the respiratory–vocal system. Focusing on spoken language negation, this article identifies an acoustic profile with which gesture is plausibly entangled, specifically linking the articulatory behaviour of onset consonant
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Effect of age of first exposure on L2 contextual lexical semantic learning: an ERP investigation Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-28 Shuang Xu, Hailing Wang, Shouxin Li, Guang Ouyang
Age of first exposure (AoFE) is an important factor that influences the quality of L2 acquisition. This study aims to investigate the AoFE effect on the contextual learning of L2 novel words at the neural level, as measured by the N400 component from event-related potentials (ERPs). Eighty-eight participants were recruited for the experiment of L2 pseudoword learning, which includes a learning session
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Dynamics of English gratitude expression: a corpus-assisted analysis of UK government COVID-19 briefings Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-09 Jilan Wei, M. Lynne Murphy
With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging)
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Developments in event conceptualisation and event integration in language and mind Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Jill Hohenstein, Xinyan Kou, Efstathia Soroli
This essay is the introduction to the Special Issue ‘Events in language and mind: Theoretical and empirical advances in the event integration theory’. We first review Leonard Talmy’s event integration theory in addition to some critiques of this framework. Following this, we point to some empirical research inspired by this framework, which explores the interaction between language and cognition. We
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A multimodal approach to polysemy: the senses of touch Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Irene Bolumar Martínez, Daniel Alcaraz Carrión, Javier Valenzuela Manzanares
This study investigated whether speakers use multimodal information (speech and gesture) to differentiate the physical and emotional meanings of the polysemous verb touch. We analyzed 302 hand gestures that co-occurred with this perception verb. For each case, we annotated (1) the meaning of touch (physical vs. emotional), (2) the gesture referent speakers physically touched (other-touch vs. self-touch)
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What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Thomas Van Hoey, Xiaoyu Yu, Tung-Le Pan, Youngah Do
A well-known method of studying iconic words is through the collection of subjective ratings. We collected such ratings regarding familiarity, iconicity, imagery/imageability, concreteness, sensory experience rating (SER), valence and arousal for Mandarin ABB words. This is a type of phrasal compound consisting of a prosaic syllable A and a reduplicated BB part, resulting in a vivid phrasal compound
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Visual similarity effects in the identification of Arabic letters: evidence with masked priming Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-19 Maryam A. AlJassmi, Manuel Perea
Research using masked priming and parafoveal preview techniques has shown that visual letter similarity has an impact on word processing during the initial stages in Latin-derived scripts. However, these effects appear to be absent in Arabic. One reason for this discrepancy could be attributed to the distinctive features of the Arabic script, which includes numerous letters sharing a basic form while
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The organization of semantic associations between senses in language Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Jorge A. Alvarado, Carlos Velasco, Alejandro Salgado
Distributional semantic representations were used to investigate crossmodal correspondences within language, offering a comprehensive analysis of how sensory experiences interconnect in linguistic constructs. By computing semantic proximity between words from different sensory modalities, a crossmodal semantic network was constructed, providing a general view of crossmodal correspondences in the English
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About the same thing in a different way: wording and experienced emotions in the understanding of official letters Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Marta M. Jankowska, Kamil K. Imbir
Reading official letters and being able to react to them appropriately is part of the daily life of every adult in many countries. Although the history of the plain language movement dates to the past century, it is only now that efforts are being made in Poland to adapt official documents to their audience. In this paper, we describe the results of a study (N = 685) in which we examined how particular
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A mathematical model of semantic access in lexical and semantic decisions Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Sergio E. Chaigneau, Nicolás Marchant, Enrique Canessa, Nerea Aldunate
In this work, we use a mathematical model of the property listing task dynamics and test its ability to predict processing time in semantic and lexical decision tasks. The study aims at exploring the temporal dynamics of semantic access in these tasks and showing that the mathematical model captures essential aspects of semantic access, beyond the original task for which it was developed. In two studies
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Exploring conceptual representation and grounding through perceptual strength norms in deaf individuals Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Simona Amenta, Giulia Loca, Gabriele Gianfreda, Pasquale Rinaldi, Francesco Pavani
In this study, our objective was to explore the impact of hearing loss on the conceptual system underlying word meaning. We collected perceptual strength norms for 200 Italian words from early deaf individuals with limited or no access to auditory information and compared them to existing norms from hearing individuals. For each word, participants provided perceptual strength ratings for each perceptual
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Visual channel facilitates the comprehension of the intonation of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations: evidence from congruent and incongruent stimuli Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Luma da Silva Miranda, João Antônio de Moraes, Albert Rilliard
This paper presents an audiovisual perceptual analysis of the wh-question and wh-exclamation intonation in Brazilian Portuguese using auditory–visual congruent and incongruent stimuli, to investigate the relative importance of each modality in signaling pragmatic meanings. Ten Brazilian Portuguese speakers (five female) were filmed while producing both speech acts 10 times. Next, artificial stimuli
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Praxis, demonstration and pantomime: a motion capture investigation of differences in action performances Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Przemysław Żywiczyński, Marek Placiński, Marta Sibierska, Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska, Sławomir Wacewicz, Michał Meina, Peter Gärdenfors
A commonly held assumption is that demonstration and pantomime differ from ordinary action in that the movements are slowed down and exaggerated to be better understood by intended receivers. This claim has, however, been based on meagre empirical support. This article provides direct evidence that the different functional demands of demonstration and pantomime result in motion characteristics that
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Are schematic diagrams valid visual representations of concepts? Evidence from mental imagery in online processing of English prepositions Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Menghan Wang, Helen Zhao
Embodied imagery hypothesis proposes the activation of perceptual-motor systems during language processing. Previous studies primarily used concrete visual stimuli to investigate mental imagery in language processing by native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners, but few studies employed schematic diagrams. The study aims to investigate mental imagery in processing prepositional phrases
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Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Lea Fricke, Patrick G. Grosz, Tatjana Scheffler
The literature on face emojis raises the central question whether they should be treated as pictures or conventionalized signals. Our experiment addresses this question by investigating semantic differences in visually similar face emojis. We test a prediction following from a pictorial approach: small visual features of emojis that do not correspond to human facial features should be semantically
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Facial cues to anger affect meaning interpretation of subsequent spoken prosody Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Caterina Petrone, Francesca Carbone, Nicolas Audibert, Maud Champagne-Lavau
In everyday life, visual information often precedes the auditory one, hence influencing its evaluation (e.g., seeing somebody’s angry face makes us expect them to speak to us angrily). By using the cross-modal affective paradigm, we investigated the influence of facial gestures when the subsequent acoustic signal is emotionally unclear (neutral or produced with a limited repertoire of cues to anger)
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Word-object and action-object learning in a unimodal context during early childhood Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Sarah Eiteljoerge, Birgit Elsner, Nivedita Mani
Word-object and action-object learning in children aged 30 to 48 months appears to develop at a similar time scale and adheres to similar attentional constraints. However, children below 36 months show different patterns of learning word-object and action-object associations when this information is presented in a bimodal context (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b). Here, we investigated 12- and 24-month-olds’
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Language and executive function relationships in the real world: insights from deafness Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Mario Figueroa, Nicola Botting, Gary Morgan
Executive functions (EFs) in both regulatory and meta-cognitive contexts are important for a wide variety of children’s daily activities, including play and learning. Despite the growing literature supporting the relationship between EF and language, few studies have focused on these links during everyday behaviours. Data were collected on 208 children from 6 to 12 years old of whom 89 were deaf children
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The influences of narrative perspective shift and scene detail on narrative semantic processing Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Jian Jin, Siyun Liu
The embodied view of semantic processing holds that readers achieve reading comprehension through mental simulation of the objects and events described in the narrative. However, it remains unclear whether and how the encoding of linguistic factors in narrative descriptions impacts narrative semantic processing. This study aims to explore this issue under the narrative context with and without perspective
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The role of consciousness in Chinese nominal metaphor processing: a psychophysical approach Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Kaiwen Cheng, Yu Chen, Hongmei Yan, Ling Wang
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) holds that most conceptual metaphors are processed unconsciously. However, whether multiple words can be integrated into a holistic metaphoric sentence without consciousness remains controversial in cognitive science and psychology. This study aims to investigate the role of consciousness in processing Chinese nominal metaphoric sentences ‘A是B’ (A is[like] B) with a
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Prosody of focus in Turkish Sign Language Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Serpil Karabüklü, Aslı Gürer
Prosodic realization of focus has been a widely investigated topic across languages and modalities. Simultaneous focus strategies are intriguing to see how they interact regarding their functional and temporal alignment. We explored the multichannel (manual and nonmanual) realization of focus in Turkish Sign Language. We elicited data with focus type, syntactic roles and movement type variables from
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Contrasting the semantic space of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ in English and Japanese Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Eugenia Diegoli, Emily Öhman
This article sheds light on the significant yet nuanced roles of shame and guilt in influencing moral behaviour, a phenomenon that became particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic with the community’s heightened desire to be seen as moral. These emotions are central to human interactions, and the question of how they are conveyed linguistically is a vast and important one. Our study contributes
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Better letter: iconicity in the manual alphabets of American Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Carl Börstell
While iconicity has sometimes been defined as meaning transparency, it is better defined as a subjective phenomenon bound to an individual’s perception and influenced by their previous language experience. In this article, I investigate the subjective nature of iconicity through an experiment in which 72 deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing (signing and non-signing) participants rate the iconicity of
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Backchannel behavior is idiosyncratic Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Peter Blomsma, Julija Vaitonyté, Gabriel Skantze, Marc Swerts
In spoken conversations, speakers and their addressees constantly seek and provide different forms of audiovisual feedback, also known as backchannels, which include nodding, vocalizations and facial expressions. It has previously been shown that addressees backchannel at specific points during an interaction, namely after a speaker provided a cue to elicit feedback from the addressee. However, addressees
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Deictic shift in the production of direct and indirect speech Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Jianan Li, Katinka Dijkstra, Rolf A. Zwaan
We investigated how deictic shifts and memory representation influence production difficulties in reported speech. In Experiment 1, participants read short stories, including a conversation between two protagonists. Participants then recalled the last sentence from the conversation in either direct or indirect speech. When participants had verbatim memory of the to-be-reported utterance, direct speech
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The effects of word and beat priming on Mandarin lexical stress recognition: an event-related potential study Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Wenjing Yu, Yu-Fu Chien, Bing Wang, Jianjun Zhao, Weijun Li
Music and language are unique communication tools in human society, where stress plays a crucial role. Many studies have examined the recognition of lexical stress in Indo-European languages using beat/rhythm priming, but few studies have examined the cross-domain relationship between musical and linguistic stress in tonal languages. The current study investigates how musical stress and lexical stress
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Does word knowledge account for the effect of world knowledge on pronoun interpretation? Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Cameron R. Jones, Benjamin Bergen
To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs)
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Motion events in Swedish and French: a Holistic Spatial Semantics analysis Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Nataliia Vesnina
The present study investigates cross-linguistic differences in the description of motion events using Holistic Spatial Semantics (HSS) as a theoretical framework. In this study, six short video stimuli featuring various motion situations were used to elicit narratives from 35 speakers of French and 29 speakers of Swedish. The proportions of semantic category Path linguistically expressed did not vary
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The effect of lexicalization biases on cross-situational statistical learning of novel verbs Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Nathan R. George, Sabina Ciaccio, Lucia Berry, Daniel J. Weiss
Languages vary in the mapping of relational terms onto events. For instance, English motion descriptions favor manner (how something moves) verbs over path (where something move) verbs, whereas those of other languages, like Spanish, show the opposite pattern. While these lexicalization biases are malleable, adopting a novel lexicalization pattern can be slow for second language learners. One potential
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Manner, result, and intention: implications for event typology from a cognitive account of verb semantics based on fulfilment types Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Xinyan Kou, Jill Hohenstein
Verb semantics has been widely approached as a dichotomy of manner and result. However, from a cognitive perspective, manner and result are often linked by intention, as captured by the ‘fulfilment type’ property formulated in the Realisation event domain in Talmy’s event integration theory. The four ‘fulfilment types’ (intrinsic-, moot-, implied-, and attained-fulfilment) indicate different degrees
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How language influences spatial thinking, categorization of motion events, and gaze behavior: a cross-linguistic comparison Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Efstathia Soroli
According to Talmy, in verb-framed languages (e.g., French), the core schema of an event (Path) is lexicalized, leaving the co-event (Manner) in the periphery of the sentence or optional; in satellite-framed languages (e.g., English), the core schema is jointly expressed with the co-event in construals that lexicalize Manner and express Path peripherally. Some studies suggest that such differences
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Processing manner under high cognitive pressure: Evidence from French–English and English–French simultaneous interpreting Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Christophe Combe, Dejan Stosic
The expression of manner has been extensively studied in the case of motion event descriptions, unveiling significant typological differences between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages and cognitive differences between speakers of these languages. However, far from being restricted to this semantic domain, the expression of manner extends to other types of event descriptions and across virtually
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The semantic content of concrete, abstract, specific, and generic concepts Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Caterina Villani, Adele Loia, Marianna M. Bolognesi
ion processes involve two variables that are often confused with one another: concreteness (banana versus belief) and specificity (chair versus furniture or Buddhism versus religion). Researchers are investigating the relationship between them, but many questions remain open, such as: What type of semantics characterizes words with varying degrees of concreteness and specificity? We tackle this topic
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What makes an awfully good oxymoron? Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Marianna M. Bolognesi, Claudia Roberta Combei, Marta La Pietra, Francesca Masini
Oxymorons combine two opposite terms in a paradoxical manner. They are closely intertwined with antonymy, since the union of antonymous items creates the paradoxical effect of the oxymoron and generates a new meaning. Compared to other forms of figurative language, oxymorons are largely underinvestigated. We explored what makes good oxymorons through a crowdsourcing task in which we asked participants
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Individual differences in structural priming in bilingual and monolingual children: the influence of perspective-taking Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Joyce L. van Zwet, Sharon Unsworth
When speaking or writing, people tend to re-use the syntactic structures they recently encountered (structural priming). Individuals differ in the extent to which they are primed (primeability). Previous research has suggested that perspective-taking, that is, the ability to imagine the feelings, thoughts and perceptions of others, predicts the magnitude of priming in adults. The present study investigates
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Explicit instruction improves the comprehension of Spanish object relatives by young monolingual children Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Miquel Llompart, Ewa Dąbrowska
The present study assessed the comprehension of Spanish object relative (OR) clauses by 6- and 7-year-old children before and after a brief training session targeting the structural differences between ORs and subject relatives. In addition, we investigated the potential relationships between OR comprehension on the one hand and vocabulary size and non-verbal intelligence quotient (IQ) on the other
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Feedback quality and divided attention: exploring commentaries on alignment in task-oriented dialogue Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Ludivine Crible, Greta Gandolfi, Martin J. Pickering
While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue
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Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: a hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Melike Akkaraca Kose, Ruth Breeze
This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative
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Aesthetic emotional reactions and their verbal expression in a corpus of Japanese travellers’ online reviews Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Javier E. Díaz-Vera
Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I propose a study of aesthetic emotional expressions in Japanese. With this aim, I have created a medium-sized corpus (c100,000 running words) of travellers’ reviews in Japanese published on TripAdvisor between 2012 and 2022. The corpus consists of 1,100 reviews, grouped into three subsections, corresponding to three of the most visited landmarks in Japan (namely,
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Exploring metaphorical conceptualizations of ENVY in English and Chinese: A multifactorial corpus analysis Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Shuqiong Wu, Dilin Liu
Adopting a multifactorial analysis, this corpus-based comparative study examines the metaphorical conceptualizations of ENVY in American English and Chinese. All the metaphorical occurrences of ENVY in the two languages were collected from the corpora and then submitted to a detailed semantic and usage analysis. The qualitative and quantitative analyses show both striking similarities and differences
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Looking differently at locative events: the cognitive impact of linguistic preferences Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Mégane Lesuisse, Maarten Lemmens
While the Talmian dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages has been amply studied for motion events, it has been less discussed for locative events, even if Talmy considers these to be included in motion events. This paper discusses such locative events, starting from the significant cross-linguistic variation among Dutch, French, and English. Dutch habitually encodes location via
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Multimodal encoding of motion events in speech, gesture and cognition Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Ercenur Ünal, Ezgi Mamus, Aslı Özyürek
How people communicate about motion events and how this is shaped by language typology are mostly studied with a focus on linguistic encoding in speech. Yet, human communication typically involves an interactional exchange of multimodal signals, such as hand gestures that have different affordances for representing event components. Here, we review recent empirical evidence on multimodal encoding of
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A self-paced reading study of context effects in the processing of aspectual verbs in Mandarin Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Ye Ma, Brian Buccola, Shannon Cousins, Alan Beretta
Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized
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Who’s afraid of homophones? A multimethodological approach to homophony avoidance Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Isabeau De Smet, Laura Rosseel
Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several
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Animacy effects in the English genitive alternation: comparing native speakers and EFL learner judgments with corpus data Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Tanguy Dubois, Jason Grafmiller, Magali Paquot, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Recent years have seen a heightened interest in the interface between language use and cognition in language learners. In this study, we investigate this interface further by conducting a rating task experiment on the intuitions of 25 native speakers and 101 low–intermediate to advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language regarding the acceptability of the genitive variants (the beauty of nature/nature’s
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Event end-state encoding in 13-month-olds—completed and non-completed events are different Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Angela Xiaoxue He, Sudha Arunachalam
Young children sometimes incorrectly interpret verbs that have a “result” meaning, such as understanding ‘fill’ to refer to adding liquid to a cup rather than filling it to a particular level. Given cross-linguistic differences in how event components are realized in language, past research has attributed such errors to non-adultlike event-language mappings. In the current study, we explore whether
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The conceptual nature of the Turkish emotion term ‘Heyecan’ Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Melike Baş
This study aims at investigating the Turkish emotion concept heyecan (i.e., thrill, excitement, and nervousness), which can be used with different semantic contents depending on the context. The conceptual metaphor theory frames this analysis to reveal the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of heyecan. For this purpose, the lemma heyecan is searched in the Turkish National Corpus, and
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Women, blood, and dangerous things: socio-cultural variation in the conceptualization of menstruation Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Margot Vancauwenbergh, Karlien Franco
This study examines a collection of expressions for the taboo topic of menstruation in Dutch, German, and Mandarin Chinese. A model for the identification of conceptualization patterns in taboo verbalizations is set up, analyzing each expression according to the X-phemistic mechanisms and, if applicable, the metaphorical source domains or metonymic vehicles at its origin. The various conceptualizations
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Degree of bilingualism and executive function in early childhood Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 My V. H. Nguyen, Lindsey A. Hutchison, Gabrielle Norvell, Danielle L. Mead, Adam Winsler
This study explores the relationship between executive functioning (EF) and degree of bilingualism in a sample (N = 79) of 5- to 7-year-old monolingual and bilingual children. The bilingual group included children who are fully fluent in two languages (balanced bilinguals) and children who are still learning their second language (dual-language learners (DLLs). In general, findings revealed mixed associations
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The flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in listening comprehension: evidence from the visual world paradigm Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Zitong Zhao, Jinfeng Ding, Jiayu Wang, Yiya Chen, Xiaoqing Li
Using the visual world paradigm with printed words, this study investigated the flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in real-time speech processing. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to spoken sentences containing highly predictable target words and viewed a visual array with a critical word and a distractor word on the screen. The critical word was manipulated
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The many facets of inhibitory control and their role in syntactic selection Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Małgorzata Korko, Mark Coulson, Alexander Jones, Paul de Mornay Davies
There is accumulating evidence that distinct forms of domain-general inhibition underlie the selection of lexical candidates from among co-activated representations in single-word production. It is less clear whether similar control processes are engaged in the resolution of syntactic conflict in sentence production. This study assessed the relative contribution of three types of inhibitory control
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More than just ambivalence: the perception of emotionally ambiguous words on the spaces of origin and activation indexed by behavioural and webcam-based eye-tracking correlates Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Adrianna Wielgopolan, Kamil K. Imbir
When we think about emotional ambiguity, we usually think about the feeling of ambivalence. However, in a recently proposed model, ambiguity might also be present in different emotional spaces, such as origin (dimensions of automaticity and reflectiveness) and activation (arousal and subjective significance) as proposed in the basics of dual-process theories. In two experiments, we checked for behavioural
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Gender is conceptualized in different ways across cultures Language and Cognition (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Claudia Mazzuca, Anna M. Borghi, Saskia van Putten, Luisa Lugli, Roberto Nicoletti, Asifa Majid
Gender can be considered an embodied social concept encompassing biological and cultural components. In this study, we explored whether the concept of gender varies as a function of different cultural and linguistic norms by comparing communities that vary in their social treatment of gender-related issues and linguistic encoding of gender. In Study 1, Italian, Dutch, and English-speaking participants