Few studies have explored in depth the mechanisms that underlie the execution of the property generation task, in spite of its importance and wide usage. The main exception to this is Santos, Chaigneau, Simmons, and Barsalou’s (2011) research: they claim that the two mechanisms at issue are word association and situated simulation. On the basis of the Linguistic and Situated Simulation theory, these

In the context of theories of statistical learning, frequency of encounter is viewed as a major driving force in L2 acquisition. The present paper challenges this position with respect to core components at the level of language competence which relate to language-specific patterns in cognitive construal. Empirical evidence from very advanced L2 speakers (L1 French, L2 English and L2 German) shows

Referential metonymy, e.g. ‘the moustache (= man with a moustache) sits down first’, appears early in L1 acquisition (Falkum, Recasens & Clark, 2017). Yet how does it emerge in pragmatically mature but linguistically developing adult L2 learners? We used one comprehension and two production tasks, based on Falkum and colleagues (2017), to investigate metonymy abilities in 34 Japanese adult learners

This paper discusses the traceback method, which has been the basis of some influential papers on first language acquisition. The method sets out to demonstrate that many or even all utterances in a test corpus (usually the last two sessions of recording) can be accounted for with the help of recurrent fixed strings (like What’s that?) or frame-and-slot patterns (like [What’s X?]) that can also be

This study evaluates the relative effects of two cognitive linguistic approaches – using animated versus static scenes in an illustration based on the spatial concept-oriented metaphor – and a non-cognitive linguistic approach on the Japanese EFL learners’ processing of request strategies with degrees of politeness. The cognitive linguistic approach consisted of applying the metaphor politeness is

Two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, when naar was used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent than when richting was used. Experiment 2 and Experiment

This paper investigates whether differences in grammar affect the production of discourse relations. We report the results of two story continuation experiments on speakers of two typologically unrelated languages, English and Korean, and in two different discourse genres, monologues (Experiment 1) and conversations (Experiment 2), focusing on the contrast between the explanation discourse relation

Boye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific

By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent

Speakers of the world’s languages differ in the ways they talk about directed motion. Speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-languages; e.g., English) typically conflate Path and Manner in a single clause (e.g., run out), whereas speakers of verb-framed languages (V-languages; e.g., Spanish) tend to convey Path and Manner in two different clauses (e.g., salir corriendo ‘exit running’). Herein, we

It is assumed from a usage-based perspective that learner language constructions emerge from natural language use in social interaction through exemplar learning. In L1, young learners have been shown to develop their constructions from lexically specific, formulaic expressions into more productive, abstract schemas. A similar developmental path has been shown for L2 development, with some exceptions

Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as a set of elements determined by a theme given in

Research on figurative meaning in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would benefit from considering a greater variety of data types and using more diverse methods. Previous studies have predominantly applied experimental methods to investigate processing of figurative language (mostly metaphor) and have for the most part concluded that individuals with ASD have deficits in figurative language comprehension

Looking at the way different linguistic communities speak about a universally shared domain of experience raises questions that are central to the language sciences. How can we compare meaning across languages? What is the interaction between language, thought, and perception? Does linguistic diversity entail linguistic relativism? The literature on the naming systems of the body across languages have

This corpus study explores how sound events are communicated in English and Spanish. The aims are to (i) contribute production data for a better understanding of the couplings of meanings and their realizations, (ii) account for typological differences between the languages, and (iii) further the theoretical discussion of how sound is conceptualized through the window of language. We found that, while

This study investigated the comprehension of plural morphosyntactic markers and its relationship with numerical comparison abilities in children with Down syndrome (DS). It evaluated 16 Spanish-speaking children with DS (mean verbal mental age = 3;6) and 16 typically developing children with similar receptive vocabulary (mean chronological age = 3;5). Children participated in two preferential looking

Gender has been the focus of linguistic and psychological studies, but little is known about its conceptual representation. We investigate whether the conceptual structure of gender – as expressed in participants’ free-listing responses – varies according to gender-related experiences in line with research on conceptual flexibility. Specifically, we tested groups that varied by gender identity, sexual

We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations

The Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors have provided a fertile testing ground for the psychological reality of space-time metaphors. Despite this, little research has targeted the linguistic patterns used in these two mappings. To fill that gap, the current study uses corpus data to examine the use of motion verbs in two typologically different languages, English and Spanish. We first investigated

A central question in language acquisition is how children master sentence types that they have seldom, if ever, heard. Here we report the findings of a pre-registered, randomised, single-blind intervention study designed to test the prediction that, for one such sentence type, complex questions (e.g., Is the crocodile who’s hot eating?), children could combine schemas learned, on the basis of the

Are communicators perceived as committed to what they actually say (what is explicit), or to what they mean (including what is implicit)? Some research claims that explicit communication leads to a higher attribution of commitment and more accountability than implicit communication. Here we present theoretical arguments and experimental data to the contrary. We present three studies exploring whether

Iconicity has traditionally been considered an objective, fixed, unidimensional property of language forms, often operationalized as transparency for experimental purposes. Within a Cognitive Linguistics framework, iconicity is a mapping between an individual’s construal of form and construal of meaning, such that iconicity is subjective, dynamic, and multidimensional. We test the latter alternative

Reaction times for a translation recognition study are reported where novice to expert English–ASL bilinguals rejected English translation distractors for ASL signs that were related to the correct translations through phonology, semantics, or both form and meaning (diagrammatic iconicity). Imageability ratings of concepts impacted performance in all conditions; when imageability was high, participants

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use

While speculations on form–meaning resemblances in language go back millennia, the experimental study of iconicity is only about a century old. Here we take stock of experimental work on iconicity and present a double special issue with a diverse set of new contributions. We contextualise the work by introducing a typology of approaches to iconicity in language. Some approaches construe iconicity as

Psycholinguistic research has shown that conceptual metaphors influence how people produce and understand language (e.g., Gibbs, 1994, 2017a; Kovecses, 2015; Jacobs & Kinder, 2017). So far, investigations have mostly paid attention to non-poetic metaphor comprehension. This focus stems from the original discovery of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that much of everyday, non-poetic language is metaphorical

This paper offers an experimental approach to the polysemy of the Estonian perception verb tundma ‘to feel’ from the perspective of the perception ➔ cognition metaphor. First, a sorting task is used to map how native speakers perceive the different senses of tundma ‘to feel’. The results show that cognition-related senses of tundma form the most distinct and coherent group. This set was researched

Most assessments of cognitive abilities are language bound (e.g., directions presented orally or written), even when not assessing linguistic ability. Understanding the relationship between bilingual language acquisition and outcomes on tests of cognitive abilities is critical, given the reliance on intelligence assessment for learning disability accommodations and intellectual disability diagnoses

Words like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’, and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form–meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this association. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity

We tested whether the proportion of typical sentences in a series of auditory sentences would lead people to adjust the strength of activation of world knowledge (i.e., retrieval rules adaptation) during comprehension. This issue is important because it could help clarify how people efficiently integrate different memory information in cognitive processes. In two experiments, all task materials were

We argue that the interpretation of transitive aspectual-verb sentences like “ Sue finishes the book ” results from an evaluation of the degree of asymmetry in control power between the participants in the sentence. Control asymmetry is proposed as one conceptual constraint on sentence meaning precisification. An evaluation of ‘high control asymmetry’ for the relation between “Sue” and “book” yields

Onomatopoeia is widespread across the world’s languages. They represent a relatively simple iconic mapping: the phonological/phonetic properties of the word evokes acoustic related features of referents. Here, we explore the EEG correlates of processing onomatopoeia in English. Participants were presented with a written cue-word (e.g., leash ) and then with a spoken target-word. The target-word was

In contrast to arbitrariness, a recent perspective is that words contain both arbitrary and iconic aspects. We investigated iconicity in word recognition, and the possibility that iconic words have special links between phonological and semantic features that may facilitate their processing. In Experiment 1, participants completed a lexical decision task (“Is this letter string a word?”) including

This paper investigates the underlying cognitive processes of sound–color associations by connecting perceptual evidence from research on cross-modal correspondences to sound symbolic patterns in the words for colors in natural languages. Building upon earlier perceptual experiments, we hypothesized that sonorous and bright phonemes would be over-represented in the words for bright and saturated colors

Recent work suggests that not all aspects of learning benefit from an iconicity advantage (Ortega, 2017). We present the results of an artificial sign language learning experiment testing the hypothesis that iconicity may help learners to learn mappings between forms and meanings, whilst having a negative impact on learning specific features of the form. We used a 3D camera (Microsoft Kinect) to capture

Using ten English adjectives, this study tests the hypothesis that the vowels in adjectives in predicative constructions are longer than those in attributive constructions in spoken conversation. The analyses considered a number of factors: occurrence before a pause, lexical adjective, vowel identity, probability given surrounding words, and others. Two sets of statistical techniques were used: a Mixed-effects

In this study we explore whether different types of iconic gestures (i.e., acting, drawing, representing) and their combinations are used systematically to distinguish between different semantic categories in production and comprehension. In Study 1, we elicited silent gestures from Mexican and Dutch participants to represent concepts from three semantic categories: actions, manipulable objects, and

Satire is a subtle type of figurative discourse and is still relatively under-studied from the perspective of figurative language researchers. The purpose of this study is to investigate cognitive, demographic, and pragmatic factors previously suggested to influence satire processing and comprehension but which have yet to be studied using behavioral methods. Specifically, this study examines Need

The present study explores whether embodied meaning is activated in comprehension of action-related Mandarin counterfactual sentences. Participants listened to action-related Mandarin factual or counterfactual sentences describing transfer events (actions towards or away from the participant), and then performed verb-compatible or -incompatible motor action after a transfer verb (action towards or

The issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts – for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate

Y -adjectives are English adjectives that end in an orthographic and a /i/ sound, for example lazy . Deriving its hypotheses from previous corpus findings and construction-based principles to language study, the experiment here reported validates the benefit a comparative alternation account of y -adjectives will accrue from a consideration of more and - er constructions across disyllabic adjectives

Growing evidence from across the cognitive sciences indicates that iconicity plays an important role in a number of fundamental language processes, spanning learning, comprehension, and online use. One benefit of this recent upsurge in empirical work is the diversification of methods available for measuring iconicity. In this paper, we provide an overview of methods in the form of a ‘toolbox’. We lay

The sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual

Buddhist and Hindu discourse often juxtapose statements about the inexpressibility of ultimate reality with descriptions drawing on metaphor and paradox. This raises the question of how particular types of metaphor fulfill the role of expressing what is believed to be inexpressible. The current study employs a cognitive linguistic framework to examine how modern Buddhist and Hindu religious teachers

We spend much of our time consuming stories across different types of media, often becoming deeply engaged or transported into these stories. However, there has been almost no research into whether processing a story in one’s non-native language influences our level of transportation. We analyzed three existing datasets in order to compare engagement with English-language stories for those who reported

Iconicity is often defined as the resemblance between a form and a given meaning, while transparency is defined as the ability to infer a given meaning based on the form. This study examined the influence of knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) on the perceived iconicity of signs and the relationship between iconicity, transparency (correctly guessed signs), 'perceived transparency' (transparency

Conceptual metaphor theory and other important theories in metaphor research are often experimentally tested by studying the effects of metaphorical frames on individuals' reasoning. Metaphorical frames can be identified by at least two levels of analysis: words vs. concepts. Previous overviews of metaphorical-framing effects have mostly focused on metaphorical framing through words (metaphorical-words

This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf ) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview ). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer

Metaphor and metonymy are likely the most common forms of non-literal language. As metaphor and metonymy differ conceptually and in how easy they are to comprehend, it seems likely that they also differ in their degree of non-literalness. They frequently occur in idioms which are foremost non-literal, fixed expressions. Given that non-literalness seems to be the defining criterion of what constitutes

In this paper I present a framework for the conceptualization of languages based on the prototype theory of categorization proposed by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues for natural semantic categories. It is motivated by research in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, where a high level of multilingualism in non-standardized varieties is the norm, making accurate description of languages, and

Inference has long been acknowledged as a key aspect of comprehending narratives of all kinds, be they verbal discourse or visual narratives like comics and films. While both theoretical and empirical evidence points towards such inference generation in sequential images, most of these approaches remain at a fairly broad level. Few approaches have detailed the specific cues and constructions used to

Onomatopoeia appear in high quantities in many infants’ earliest words, yet there is minimal research in this area. Instead, findings from the wider iconicity literature are generalised to include onomatopoeia, leading to the assumption that their iconic status makes them inherently learnable, thereby prompting their early production. In this review we bring together the literature on onomatopoeia

How do we communicate our pain to others? The challenge of conveying such a highly individual experience in words is faced daily by many sufferers of chronic pain and their doctors. Moreover, such linguistic strategies are especially relevant in situations where no obvious reference to physical injuries or tissue damage can be made. Neurolinguistically, this question is directly linked to understanding

We investigate how German and Korean speakers describe everyday spatial/motion events, such as putting a cup on the table. In these motion events, the moving object (e.g., cup) and the non-moving reference object (e.g., table) take on the roles of Figure and Ground, respectively. Figure(F) and Ground(G) thus have distinct perceptual properties and assume conceptually asymmetric roles (entity moving

The likelihood with which language users insert optional words or morphemes that explicitly mark syntactic structure tends to increase in complex grammatical environments. This positive correlation between explicitness and complexity, best known as the Complexity Principle, has been observed for a multitude of case studies in both naturally occurring language and experimental settings. Researchers

This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of a constraint on the use on intrinsic frames of reference proposed by Levelt (1984, 1996). This proposed constraint claims that use of intrinsic frames when the ground object is in non-canonical position is blocked due to conflict with gravitational-based reference frames. Regression models of the data from Arabic, K’iche’, Spanish, Yucatec, and

Conceptual metaphor research has benefited from advances in discourse analytic and corpus linguistic methodologies over the years, especially given recent developments with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Such technologies are now capable of identifying metaphoric expressions across large bodies of text. Here we focus on how one particular analytic tool, MetaNet, can be used to study

This paper studies two types of cognitive factors which have been assumed to underpin people’s interpretation of conditional promises and threats: logic and socio-cognitive assumptions about what conditional promisors and threateners are obliged and permitted to do. We consider whether the logic of conditionals is compatible with the socio-cognitive assumptions underlying their interpretation or whether

When children tell stories, they gesture; their gestures can predict how their narrative abilities will progress. Five-year-olds who gestured from the point of view of a character (CVPT gesture) when telling stories produced better-structured narratives at later ages (Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). But does gesture just predict narrative structure, or can asking children to gesture in a particular

While theories on predictive processing posit that predictions are based on one’s prior experiences, experimental work has effectively ignored the fact that people differ from each other in their linguistic experiences and, consequently, in the predictions they generate. We examine usage-based variation by means of three groups of participants (recruiters, job-seekers, and people not (yet) looking