This study investigated the differences in the expression of numerical motion metaphors in English and Spanish. We evaluated 1472 English-to-Spanish translations in which a manner of motion verb (e.g., skyrocket, plummet) was used to metaphorically express numerical change (e.g., unemployment is skyrocketing). For each of the translations, we annotated (1) the type of metaphor used in Spanish, (2) whether the manner of motion and path information was present in Spanish, and (3) whether the path and manner information in Spanish were conflated in a single word or indicated via adjuncts. There were three main findings. First, Spanish translations shifted from the motion domain to a quantity domain in almost half of the translations (e.g., skyrocket translated as aumentar, Eng. increase). Second, Spanish translations omitted manner of motion in half of the cases (e.g., prices surging translated as alza de los precios, Eng. rise in prices). Third, the path of motion was always present in the Spanish translations. This translation analysis provides evidence that the typological differences reported for the encoding of literal motion are also observed in the expression of numerical, metaphorical motion and that the choice of metaphorical mappings depends on language typology.

Prosody and gesture are two known cues for expressing information structure by emphasising new or important elements in spoken discourse while attenuating given information. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning mapping to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. This study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to differentiate levels of givenness.

Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 native French speakers were video-recorded during a short spontaneous narrative task. Participants’ oral productions were annotated for information status, perceived prominence, pitch accents, and head gesture types. Results show that given information in French is multimodally less marked than new-er information and is accordingly perceived as less prominent. Our findings indicate that Catalan learners of French mark given information more frequently than native speakers and may transfer their use of low pitch accents to their second language (L2). The data also show that the use of head gestures depends on the presence of prosodic marking, calling into question the assumption that prosody and gesture have balanced functional roles. Finally, the type of head gesture does not appear to play a significant role in marking information status.

Embodied cognition theory proposes that spatial cognition preferences facilitate the simulation of action language. Importantly, spatial cognition relies on either egocentric (body-dependent) or allocentric (body-independent) representations. Research demonstrates that spatial representation proclivity influences the simulation of non-transfer action sentences. However, the impact of individual spatial cognition preferences on transfer action sentence simulation remains unexplored. We administered an egocentric and allocentric memory task and an action sentence recognition task to 37 participants. We used an egocentric–allocentric recall strategy proclivity index to classify participants and employed this metric as a moderator between the transfer perspective (first-person perspective, 1PP vs. third-person perspective, 3PP) and the transfer type (concrete vs. abstract). We found that spatial preferences do not moderate 1PP transfer action sentence recognition. Importantly, we found that egocentric proclivity improves 3PP transfer action sentence recognition and that allocentric proclivity hampers 3PP transfer action sentence recognition. No moderation was found for the transfer type. The study suggests that recognition memory for sentences describing others’ actions is related to body-dependent spatial representations, suggesting a possible link between spatial memory proclivity and action language simulation.

The popularity of colour perception as a vehicle to investigate language–perception interactions has led to a large body of experimental work. Recently, studies have focused on investigating the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of effects of language on colour perception. Because of substantial variation in experimental designs and the study conditions in these designs, evaluating and comparing the evidence reported in these studies remains complex. This is problematic, because language–perception interactions manifest themselves differently across cognitive contexts and task designs. To shed light on the precise conditions under which such effects are obtained, we conducted a scoping review on 72 experimental papers, and we assessed the experimental approaches taken. Based on this review, we recommend committing to an interdisciplinary approach, relying on knowledge of the neuroscience of perception. We provide specific examples of how future research can carefully investigate the relationship between cognitive load, attention, working memory and verbal label access.

Grammatical aspect is a linguistic correlate of the temporal distribution of an event. However, aspect is not identical across languages. Crosslinguistic differences in mapping between aspect and basic temporal features such as event stage can reveal underlying language-specific criteria that guide event conceptualization. We investigated the relationship between grammatical aspect and event stage in conceptualizations of in-progress and completed events by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of aspectual languages Russian and English. In L1, event stage predicted aspect in Russian but not in English. In L2s, event stage did not predict aspect. We discuss these findings in terms of crosslinguistic differences in the relevance of event stage for conceptualization in L1 as well as the role of L1 transfer in L2 aspect use.

A negated proposition can be expressed linguistically and mathematically. The current study examined the one-step and two-step procedure accounts from the perspective of the practice effect and working memory by comparing performance in two simple linguistic and mathematical verification tasks. Two online experiments were conducted with simple verification tasks over 10 practice sessions: a figure-equation task (e.g., ● ≠ ▲) and a figure-sentence task (e.g., ● is not ▲). Although reaction times in the equation task were faster than in the sentence task, both tasks showed that reaction times in negations took longer than those in affirmations regardless of the sameness of the figures in the target propositions (i.e., TA < FN and FA < TN) in both experiments, and the trend was not changed by the practice. The similar trends across the tasks, regardless of the practice, support the two-step procedure account, in which participants first evaluate the positive argument of negation and then reverse the response in negative propositions. Furthermore, high correlations between performance in the tasks and both verbal and spatial working memory tasks suggest that verification judgments may involve not only language processing but also more general cognitive processing.

Language comprehension requires integration of multiple cues, but the underlying mechanisms of how accentuation, as a significant prosodic feature, influences the processing of words with different levels of cloze probability remains unclear. This study exploits event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the processing of accented and unaccented words with high-, medium-, and low-cloze probabilities embedded in the final position of highly constrained contexts during spoken sentence comprehension. Our results indicate that accentuation and cloze probability interact across the N400 and post-N400 positivity (PNP) time windows. Under the accented condition, N400 amplitudes gradually increased as cloze probability decreased. Conversely, under the unaccented condition, PNP amplitudes gradually increased as cloze probability decreased with a frontal distribution. These results suggest that the effect of predictability is influenced by accentuation, which is likely due to the processing speed and depth of the critical words, modulated by the amount of attentional resources allocated to them.

It is commonly stated that the direction in which we read and write influences our conceptualisation of the flow of time. However, research to date has only established a causal link between reading direction and temporal thought, leaving out the question of whether the act of writing indeed shapes the mental timeline. The current study addresses this gap by examining whether writing direction modulates how events are mapped onto time. Consistent with previous findings, results from a reading experiment showed that participants who read mirror texts (right-to-left orthography) indeed mapped time as flowing leftwards. However, contrary to prevailing assumptions, results from a series of writing experiments showed that participants assigned to a mirror writing condition (right-to-left orthography) displayed the same left-to-right mapping of the flow of time as participants in the standard writing condition (left-to-right orthography), despite progressive increases in mirror-writing training. It is suggested that the act of writing does not shape time concepts because it is not unambiguously unidirectional: the fine-motoric action of forming individual letters is multidirectional and thus interferes with the lateral time–space association obtained with the gross-motoric action of moving the hand/arm sideways.

This paper presents an in-depth study of the English conative construction (hit the ball vs hit at the ball), a particular case of variation between NP- and PP-patterns. Approaching the phenomenon from a usage-based, cognitive perspective, the study is interested in the different factors driving this alternation, specifically in the interaction of lexical effects on the one hand and high-level predictors relating to processing complexity on the other hand. More specifically, the paper explores the diachronic dimension of these effects, using corpus data from Middle English to Late Modern English (Penn-Helsinki Corpora of Historical English; 1150–1914). To assess the relative impact of the variables, the study compares the traditionally used methods of collostructional analysis and logistic regression to a more recent tool, namely elastic net regression. The findings ultimately indicate that while complexity does seem to play a role in this alternation, there are also strong lexical effects.

Narratives from autistic children, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children were compared for attributions of intentionality in descriptions of two animations, one inviting descriptions of social events like fighting, another one inviting descriptions of physical events like orbiting planets. The analysis was based on a semantic and syntactic classification of clauses in terms of whether the verbs require their arguments to refer to beings with subjective experience, that is, intentionality attribution as a first step in the understanding of others as beings with mental states and processes. The autistic children did not have difficulties attributing intentionality to geometric figures. Moreover, the children with DLD made more intentionality attributions in their descriptions of the physical animation than the typically developing peers. Both diagnostic groups reported fewer relevant events than the typically developing children, which is interpreted as difficulties with narrative macrostructure. The results are discussed in relation to earlier studies and with respect to what they tell us about intentionality attribution and narrative structure in autism.

Prior research indicates that language stimuli, when co-presented with sensory inputs, can enhance perceptual discrimination. However, whether this facilitation is unique to spoken language as opposed to non-verbal auditory stimuli, such as musical patterns, remains unclear. To address this question, we used difficult-to-discriminate tactile stimulus patterns and paired them repeatedly either with specific verbal, language-like labels or with matched musical sequences. Crucially, we implemented a within-subject learning design with well-matched stimuli counterbalanced across subjects. This approach involved pairing specific tactile patterns with either linguistic labels or matched sequences of musical tones and exposing all subjects to both conditions. Participants’ discrimination ability of the tactile patterns presented in isolation was evaluated both before and after associative learning. Results demonstrated that after 5 days of learning, only the tactile pattern sets associated with language stimuli – not those paired with musical sequences – showed significant improvement in discrimination. These results indicate that spoken language may indeed have an advantage over other forms of auditory input in facilitating perceptual discrimination. We discuss the underlying mechanisms of this observed perceptual advantage.

This study investigates the effect of visually perceived gestures on the overall (multimodal) prominence of naturally occurring stimuli extracted from a multimodal corpus of Maltese conversations. Experiment participants were required to rate the prominence of target words in sentences presented to them as audiovisual and audio-only stimuli. In half of the stimuli, the target word was accompanied by a co-speech hand gesture. The results of the experiment show (i) that words produced with a co-speech gesture were rated as more prominent than words that were produced without one and (ii) that this was the case independently of whether raters could see those gestures (audiovisual condition) or not (audio-only condition). An acoustic analysis of the data shows that the presence of a co-occurring gesture has a significant effect on the pitch of the target vowel. The study suggests that gestures may provide the listener with an additional but not necessary cue to perceiving prominence.

This study investigates the integration of literal completions of idiomatic multiword expressions (MWEs) into two linguistic contexts: one promoting a literal interpretation and the other a figurative one, requiring reinterpretation to align with figurative bias. Sixteen Italian idioms were distributed in two groups by their Potential Idiomatic Ambiguity (PIA) score, an index of literal plausibility, decomposability and transparency. Using experimental dialogues, the study tested whether high-PIA idioms receive higher acceptability ratings across both contexts than low-PIA idioms. Eighty-four Italian-speaking participants rated idiom literal completions within literal and figurative contexts. Results show that literal completions of high-PIA idioms integrate better across contexts, while those of low-PIA idioms receive lower ratings and have longer combined reading and rating times. This supports hybrid models of idiom processing, emphasizing the role of idiomatic features and context in balancing figurative and compositional interpretations. This study also marks an initial effort to experimentally trace systematicity within idiomatic wordplay, challenging the idea that it lacks relevance for linguistic research while outlining limitations and directions for future work.

Two experiments investigated the nature of the emotional differences between figurative language and literal counterparts. The semantic differential method was used with principal component analysis as a data-driven implicit method for distinguishing emotional variables. The first experiment found that metaphoric stories were reliably different in emotionality than their literal counterparts along three different data-defined dimensions. The second experiment extended the conclusions to the evaluation of individual words used figuratively (including simile and metaphor). In both studies, principal component analysis revealed three distinct underlying sources of variance implicit in the ratings of experimental items including the dimensions of dynamism and depth, as well as an evaluation scale in each case. Notably, all three implicit scales, though orthogonal to each other, were found to correlate with explicit judgments of emotional valence of the stories in Experiment 1. Data-derived implicit measures are an effective way of discriminating among affective dimensions in figurative linguistic stimuli.

Both gesture and talk are basic building blocks of face-to-face conversation. In this study, we address the temporal dynamics of hand gesture phases relative to places and types of turn transition. We annotated gesture features and measured temporal aspects of gesture related to speech in two languages, German and Swedish. We found variation in the temporal relationships of gesture types and alignment of gesture phases that relate to the management of turn-taking in conversation. Specifically, the frequency of different gesture phases accompanying the offset of speech differed depending on whether the same speaker held the floor or whether a new speaker took up a turn. In addition, we found that differences in temporal alignment of gesture phases can distinguish between the type of turn transition that is upcoming up to a second before the place of transition is reached. Our results emphasize the importance of the interaction of the verbal and the gestural modality to maintain the smooth flow of conversation.

Line breaks are ubiquitous in continuous text, as in this article. Despite this prevalence, their effects on parsing and interpretation have been markedly understudied in previous research on written language processing. To shed light on these effects, we conducted a self-paced reading and an eye-tracking study in which participants read multiline texts that contained direct object–subject ambiguity, a type of temporary clause boundary ambiguity. Within these texts, we manipulated the placement of line breaks so that they either regularly coincided or clashed with clause boundaries. We hypothesised that this manipulation would cause readers to adjust their parsing strategies and interpretative commitments. Results revealed that the way in which text is segmented through line breaks can significantly affect how readers parse syntactically ambiguous structures. While coinciding line breaks and clause boundaries helped readers arrive at the correct analysis of the ambiguous structures, cases of line break and clause boundary clash led readers down the garden path during online processing, and in some cases also impacted their comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the importance of text segmentation in real-world settings, such as books, educational material and digital content.

This study examines the role of the timing of obligatory disambiguating information – obligatory cues – and presence/absence of optional morphological markers in resolving temporary syntactic ambiguity in Spanish object relative clauses. Native adult comprehension (Study 1) reveals similar accuracy for clauses with relatively early obligatory cues, regardless of the presence/absence of additional markers, and those with late obligatory cues with additional markers, but reduced accuracy for those with late obligatory cues without additional markers. Given the phonetic resemblance of the late-disambiguated variant with its corresponding subject relative, we conduct two follow-up perceptual identification tasks with the whole relative clause, including the head (Study 2), and relative clause fragments (Study 3). The identification tasks show that, when instructed to attend to the form of the structures, participants perceive acoustic differences but retain a bias towards subject-relative interpretations. Our results suggest that additional markers aid comprehension of non-canonical structures when obligatory cues occur relatively late within the structure and highlight the dominance of predictive processing over perceptual information in such cases of late disambiguation.

Grammaticalization is the process whereby lexical items change into grammatical items. This phenomenon is widely attested, while the change from grammatical to lexical is far less common. We ran two experiments to test whether this unidirectional tendency originates with a preference for extending lexical meanings to grammatical ones rather than vice versa. We focus on body parts and spatial relations. In Experiment 1, participants were told the meaning of an artificial word then rated how likely it is that that word can also be used to refer to a second meaning – one meaning was a body part and one a preposition. We expected higher ratings when extending from body parts to prepositions than vice versa but found no difference. In Experiment 2, participants performed semantic extension in communication. We varied whether they extended words for body parts to prepositions or vice versa. Again, we found no asymmetry. Finally, we used a model of Experiment 2 to show that asymmetrical extension follows straightforwardly if there is an asymmetry in the number of words available relative to the number of meanings to express, indicating that having a larger number of lexical items than grammatical concepts could be an alternative source of unidirectionality.