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 these errors have a non-linguistic origin. That is, when children view an event, is their encoding of the event end-state too imprecise to discriminate between events that do versus do not arrive at their intended endpoints? Using a habituation paradigm, we tested whether 13-month-old English-learning infants (N = 86) discriminated events with different degrees of completion (e.g., draw a complete triangle versus draw most of a triangle). Results indicated successful discrimination, suggesting that sensitivity to the precise event end-state is already in place in early infancy. Thus, our results rule out one possible explanation for children’s errors with change-of-state predicates—that they do not notice the difference between end-states that vary in completion.

Y-adjectives are English adjectives that end in an orthographic <y> 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 that are not y-ones (called the HANDSOME adjectives). Reading times related to the comparative constructions of morphologically complex and simple y-adjectives were collected before and after native speaker exposure to one of three treatments – a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME more constructions, a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME-er constructions, or a control condition. Processing of y-adjective more constructions was found eased with exposure to HANDSOME more constructions. This exposure moreover overrode an anticipated processing ease for simple y-adjective -er constructions, while an exposure to HANDSOME -er constructions overrode an anticipated processing ease for complex y-adjective more constructions. The findings support the value of a constructional approach to understanding y-adjective comparatives.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder, characterised at the cognitive level by a phenotypic pattern of relative weaknesses (e.g., visuospatial skills) and strengths (e.g., some linguistic and nonverbal reasoning skills). In this study, we performed a systematic search and meta-analysis on lexical-semantic processing in WS, an area of knowledge in which contradictory results have been obtained. We found 42 studies matching our criteria, and, in total, 78 effect sizes were included in the meta-analysis. Results showed that individuals with WS have worse lexical-semantic skills than individuals with typical development, whether matched by chronological or mental age. However, people with WS have better lexical-semantic skills than people diagnosed with other cognitive disabilities. Finally, vocabulary skills seem to be relatively spared in WS, although they present some difficulties in semantic processing/integration, semantic memory organisation and verbal working memory skills. Taken together, these results support a neuroconstructivist approach, according to which the cognitive mechanisms involved in lexical-semantic processing may be modulated, even when performance in some tasks (i.e., vocabulary tasks) might be optimal.

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 lengthening with forelimb gesture preparation and facial deformation. This phenomenon was discovered in a video corpus of accented negative utterances from English-language televised dialogues. Eight target examples were selected and examined using visualization software to analyse the correspondence of gesture phase structures (preparation, stroke, holds) with the negation word’s acoustic signal (duration, pitch and intensity). The results show that as syllable–onset consonant lengthens (voiced alveolar /n/ = 300 ms on average) with pitch and intensity increasing (e.g. ‘NNNNNNEVER’), the speaker’s humerus is rotating with palm pronating/adducing while his or her face is distorting. Different facial distortions, furthermore, were found to be entangled with different post-onset phonetic profiles (e.g. vowel rounding). These findings illustrate whole-bodily dynamics and multiscalarity as key theoretical proposals within ecological and enactive approaches to language. Bringing multimodal and entangled treatments of utterances into conversation has important implications for gesture studies.

The Russian prefix pod- has several meanings, both concrete ones having to do with approaching or being under or down, and a series of seemingly unrelated abstract meanings such as imitating, ingratiating, or doing in secret. This paper approaches the polysemy of pod- from the viewpoint of the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Conceptual Models (LCCM) that sees word meaning not as a permanent property of words, but as a dynamic process in which context and accessed non-linguistic knowledge representation play an important role. This approach uses the notion of lexical concepts to describe the mediating unit between concrete linguistic examples and cognitive models that these examples are connected to. The 505 verbs analyzed bring up the lexical concepts [UNDER], [VERTICAL MOVEMENT], [CLOSE], and [CONTACT]. The connection of these lexical concepts with certain metaphorical and metonymical models is also discussed. Twelve of the 505 verbs are examined more closely in different contexts with the help of twenty-nine illustrative examples from the spoken corpus of the Russian National Corpus.

The task of finding a case type that, on average, enhances the processing of verbal material has yielded mixed results in the literature. This study tackled this issue with an eye to the issue of processing textual information on road signs and the additional consideration of readers’ attentive states. Participants (n = 104) completed three experiments, the first two of which made use of both short (i.e., attentive state) and long (i.e., nonattentive or mind-wandering state) inter-trial intervals (ITIs). Experiment I consisted of a living versus non-living category-decision task involving the presentation of single words. Experiment II consisted of a sensical versus nonsensical sentence-judgment task. Experiment III consisted of a recognition memory task for words presented during the category-decision task. No significant difference in letter-case-type effectiveness was found for either the semantic categorization of or memory for single words. On the other hand, sensical sentences were correctly judged more quickly in lower case (or, more precisely, sentence case with the first letter of the first word capitalized). Such results point to either a more fluent processing of or enhanced conceptual resonance for sentences presented in lower case.

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 participants’ gestures and quantify the accuracy with which they reproduce the target gestures in two conditions. In the iconic condition, participants were shown an artificial sign language consisting of congruent gesture–meaning pairs. In the arbitrary condition, the language consisted of non-congruent gesture–meaning pairs. We quantified the accuracy of participants’ gestures using dynamic time warping (Celebi et. al., 2013). Our results show that participants in the iconic condition learn mappings more successfully than participants in the arbitrary condition, but there is no difference in the accuracy with which participants reproduce the forms. While our work confirms that iconicity helps to establish form–meaning mappings, our study did not give conclusive evidence about the effect of iconicity on production; we suggest that iconicity may only have an impact on learning forms when these are complex.

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. Comprehension of ORs was very poor at the pre-test but improved considerably after training. Further improvement was observed between the immediate post-test and a delayed post-test, suggesting that the knowledge acquired during training had been integrated into the children’s developing linguistic systems. Non-verbal IQ and vocabulary were not found to predict comprehension accuracy. We take these results to suggest that children’s difficulties with ORs are better explained by their experience with this construction than by maturational factors and that explicit contrast and feedback can bolster grammatical development in L1 acquisition.

This study investigates the use of metaphor in the dissociative disorder depersonalization/derealization – the feeling of unreality or detachment from the senses or surrounding events. While the debilitating experience of depersonalization/derealization is prevalent, it is also under-acknowledged, such that it is often expressed through metaphor, with more typical metaphor described in diagnostic criteria. Using naturally occurring text from two prominent English language depersonalization/derealization support fora, in the current study a systematic survey is made of metaphor to communicate the experience of depersonalization/derealization in context. It is concluded that metaphor described in the formal diagnostic criteria for depersonalization/derealization does not completely represent metaphor use in the contexts investigated. A summary is made of metaphor for the experiences of depersonalization, and derealization, and depersonalization/derealization more generally, across both the contexts investigated, that may support vital understanding and diagnosis of this debilitating, under-recognized experience, across a wider demographic.

This study investigates whether child second language (L2) learners can use syntactic information during the processing of sentences involving unbounded dependencies and how their processing patterns compare to those of child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. Through a self-paced reading experiment involving the numeral quantifier (NQ) construction in Korean, we tested participants’ sensitivity to agreement violations between a noun phrase (NP) and an NQ in local and nonlocal conditions. The results showed that a subset of child L2 learners who demonstrated target-like knowledge of NP-NQ agreement in an offline task spent a longer processing time in the NP-NQ mismatch than in the NP-NQ match condition, in both local and nonlocal contexts. These child L2 learners’ processing patterns were comparable to those observed in child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. These findings suggest that child and adult L2 learners rely on the same system of syntactic representations and processing mechanisms that guide first language processing.

Perceptual information includes sensorimotor and emotional experience regarding the multimodality of the perceptual system. The current study provides an image-based visual analysis on the embodiment of color metaphors through the investigation of (i) the perceptual (dis)similarities between the literal and metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color terms hēi ‘black’ and bái ‘white’ and (ii) the influence of emotional valence on the degree of their perceptual (dis)similarities. Specifically, 24 concepts in three semantic domains were represented as eight-dimensional vectors based on the color information extracted from online images, including two color concepts of black and white, 20 abstract concepts referring to 8 metaphorical meanings of hēi and 12 metaphorical meanings of bái, and two abstract concepts referring to positive and negative affective polarity. Statistical analyses show that (i) the literal and metaphorical meanings of hēi and bái are perceptually distinguishable given their significant perceptual (dis)similarities and (ii) the observed perceptual distinguishability cannot be solely attributed to the (in)consistency of emotional valence associated with the senses. The present study provides nonlinguistic evidence for the embodiment of color metaphors in the Chinese context with an empirical approach that can simultaneously capture the metaphorical mappings and affective associations among cross-domain concepts with sensory data.

In masked priming lexical decision tasks in alphabetic or syllabic script languages, latencies are longer when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue–BLUR) than when primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care–BLUR) – an “inhibitory neighbor priming effect.” In contrast, Zhou et al. (1999) demonstrated facilitatory orthographic neighbor priming for two-character Chinese words (e.g., 华丽–华贵). However, Zhou et al. did not control for relative prime-target frequency, which has been shown to be important in experiments when examining languages with other scripts. In the present Experiment 1 word neighbor primes (e.g., 容易-容貌) produced an inhibitory neighbor priming effect when the prime was higher frequency than the target, paralleling effects in other script languages. In further experiments, paralleling those in other script languages, two-character targets primed by nonword neighbors (容待-容貌) or single constituent characters matching the target in either position (容-容貌) showed significant facilitation. These results suggest that lexical activation/competition processes for two-character Chinese words are reasonably similar to those for words in alphabetic/syllabic script languages.

Implicature interpretation is sensitive to many contextual factors. This experimental study investigates two:

1. (A) instructions to think carefully about exactly what is said

2. (B) access to the verbatim form of what has been said

Participants encountered (1) below, which can give rise to the contradictory relevance implicature in (2), as feedback during a decoy task:

1. (1) I’m not suggesting that you’re responding too slowly, but it’s important to give the first response that comes to mind.

2. (2) (I am suggesting that) you’re responding too slowly.

When participants were questioned post-task, (B) significantly reduced rates of agreement that the speaker of (1) had said (2), whether the verbatim form provided was written (Experiment 1) or audio (Experiment 2). (A) had no such effect. In Experiment 3, we added a final task for participants: to recall (1) verbatim. One-third had forgotten it, typically substituting the implicature (2). We argue that this memory loss can explain the lower implicature rates associated with verbatim access: verbatim access reminds forgetful participants of (1)’s compositional interpretation, and that interpretation is inconsistent with the implicature in (2). Consequently, verbatim access reduces the chances of endorsing (2), thus introducing an inherent literal meaning bias in interpreting previous conversation.

Abstraction 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 through an in-depth semantic analysis of 1049 Italian words for which human-generated concreteness and specificity ratings are available. Our findings show that (as expected) the semantics of concrete and abstract concepts differs, but most interestingly when specificity is considered, the variance in concreteness ratings explained by semantic types increases substantially, suggesting the need to carefully control word specificity in future research. For instance, mathematical concepts (phase) are on average abstract and generic, while behavioral qualities (arrogant) are on average abstract but specific. Moreover, through cluster analyses based on concreteness and specificity ratings, we observe the bottom-up emergence of four subgroups of semantically coherent words. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence and theoretical insight into the interplay of concreteness and specificity in shaping semantic categorization.

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 of result certainty in verbs. This study investigates whether manner/result complementarity is cognitively less dichotomous and more nuanced, as the four fulfilment types in verbs could indicate more than two mental representations of verbs. Through two psycholinguistic experiments, we examine whether fulfilment types influence the cognitive salience of manner and result in novel verb meaning interpretation (Experiment 1) and the semantic relatedness between English verbs with different fulfilment types (Experiment 2). Our results demonstrate that manner and result in the mental lexicon act less like a dichotomy but more like a cline. This blur between manner and result verb statuses has consequences for a language’s typological stance in the Realisation domain and implications for how Talmyan event research should be extended beyond well-studied Motion.