Recent research suggests that bilinguals flexibly adjust distinct types of cognitive control mechanisms to meet the linguistic demands of their language use and exposure contexts. The present study compared two groups of young, Mexican-born, sequential Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals who reported either separate or integrated use of both languages. Results showed that greater linguistic diversity across social spheres predicted different patterns of engagement in proactive and reactive control for each group. Among separate-context bilinguals, higher linguistic diversity was associated with faster reaction times in both proactive and reactive control, as well as in overall processing speed. Notably, for integrated-context bilinguals, higher linguistic diversity predicted slower responses in proactive control and processing speed. Additionally, a significant relationship emerged between L2 proficiency and accuracy on proactive control trials for separate-context bilinguals. These findings support perspectives emphasizing the interplay between proactive and reactive control as an outcome of bilinguals’ adaptation to contextual linguistic demands. An important implication is that bilingual groups who share the same language pair and are immersed in their L1 environment may nonetheless differ in cognitive performance, with such differences becoming evident when assessed through fine-grained, nonlinguistic cognitive measures.

This study investigated L2 learners’ interpretation of quantifier scope, focusing on the influence of individual differences, including L2 proficiency, working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC). A picture selection task using the covered-box paradigm (CBP) was conducted with 70 Chinese-speaking learners of English and a control group of 40 native English speakers. The results revealed that inverse scope (IS) posed particular challenges for L2 learners, leading to reduced, non-target-like access. We attribute this difficulty to factors such as negative L1 transfer, limited L2 input and increased processing demands associated with IS compared to surface scope (SS). More importantly, WM and IC significantly influenced L2 learners’ interpretation patterns, with their effects mediated by L2 proficiency. We also observed individual variation in scope interpretations among native speakers, particularly with negatively quantified (NQ) sentences. This variation provides valuable evidence of individual differences in native speakers’ grammatical knowledge and was partly driven by cognitive factors. Altogether, the findings contribute novel evidence for both domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms underlying quantifier scope interpretation in L2 learners as well as in native speakers.

Processing sentences is modulated by the grammatical aspect of the predicate. Previous studies have indicated that the English progressive and Farsi imperfective are associated with a stronger mental activation of the components or circumstances of the situation, such as instruments or locations. This study deals with the processing of sentences in Russian, a language with a perfective vs. imperfective aspectual distinction. In a self-paced reading experiment with 48 respondents, sentences were presented with (mostly) atelic verbs in either imperfective or perfective aspects and locative adverbials that were typical or atypical for the situation. We expected atypical locatives to slow down reaction times and that this effect would be the strongest in imperfective contexts because of greater mental activation of the situation. Contrary to our expectations, the perfective aspect was associated with longer reaction times for atypical locative adverbials. We interpret this as an effect of the higher functional complexity of the Russian perfective, especially in the case of the perfectives of the (mostly) atelic verbs used in our experiment.

Research has demonstrated that emotion modulates specificity in recollection of personally experienced events and the words individuals use during recollection reflect their psychological states. Here, we investigated the linguistic features of autobiographical memory (AM) of different specificity for different emotional events to address how emotion would modulate the psychological mechanisms underlying AM of different specificity. We analyzed 122 participants’ narratives of AM categorized as specific and general under happy, sad, angry, fearful and neutral cues. The use of three groups (emotional process, cognitive process and thinking style) of words was, respectively, compared between specific and general AM in each emotion condition. In retrieval of sad, angry and fearful events, general relative to specific AM contained more affective process words, notably negative words. General AM featured more cognitive process words than specific AM, regardless of emotion type (except neutral). When recalling happy events, general AM featured more analytic thinking words than specific AM, while in recollection of fearful events, general AM featured fewer such words than specific AM. General relative to specific AM about happy experiences contained more narrative thinking words. These findings suggest that the psychological mechanisms underlying top-down and bottom-up retrieval differ between particular types of emotion engaged in AM.

We investigate the synchronization of speech and co-speech actions (i.e., manual game moves) in a dyadic game interaction across different levels of information structure and mutual visibility. We analyze cross-modal synchronization as the temporal distance between co-speech actions and corresponding (1) pitch accent peaks and (2) word onsets. For (1), we find no effect of mutual visibility on cross-modal synchronization. However, pitch accent peaks and co-speech actions are more tightly aligned when game moves are prosodically prominent due to information structural needs. This result is in line with a view of a tightly coupled processing of modalities, where prominence-lending modifications in the prosodic structure attract corresponding manual actions to be realized in a way similar to ‘beat’ gestures. For (2), we do find an effect of mutual visibility, under which co-speech actions are produced earlier and more tightly aligned with word onsets. This result is in line with a view in which co-speech actions act as communicative affordances, which may help an early disambiguation of a message, similar to ‘representational’ co-speech gestures.

Anaphora, as an important linguistic phenomenon, represents a cohesive relationship concerning two parts, namely antecedent and anaphor. The choice of anaphoric forms is understudied in previous research. In this study, an annotation framework is built and a machine learning method is employed to analyse the influence of motivators on the choice of anaphoric forms. In addition, the framework of accessibility theory is modified, with causals as the study object. Results indicate that competition-, salience- and distance-related motivators, as well as text type, can significantly influence the variation of anaphoric forms. Among those motivators, predictability emerges as the most significant variable. Under the influence of these motivators, zero pronouns, noun phrases and pronouns exhibit significant differences in distribution. Pronouns have a broader distribution range and fewer restrictions compared to zero pronouns and noun phrases. Based on the results, we also modify the accessibility theory in terms of competition and salience.

Easy Language (EL) presents information in a simplified way and benefits people who have difficulty understanding standard language. The present study evaluates the effects of visual support inclusion, as it is a recurring recommendation in EL guidelines. We examined 52 adults (23 men and 29 women; mean age of 39.9; 26 with intellectual disabilities [ID], 26 neurotypical) in a mixed design study. They read EL texts that presented either no visual support, photographs or illustrations. Their eye movements were recorded, and they answered comprehension, text difficulty and style preference questions. The inclusion of visual support had no effect on comprehension, nor did the type of visual support (photographs/illustrations). The group (ID/neurotypical) and the type of visual support also showed no effects on the perceived difficulty of the text. Neurotypical participants showed a preference for illustrations. Photographs may be more difficult to interpret than illustrations due to longer fixations and shorter saccades in both groups. The group with an ID showed more and longer fixations, especially on text and whitespace, while the neurotypical group tended to explore the image more. Results prompt a discussion on the potential improvements of EL guidelines and highlight the need for similar empirical studies in the area.

This study investigates the English of-NP (noun phrase) evaluation construction (e.g., It’s nice of you to help me plan this wedding), hypothesizing that its constructional meaning encodes socially mediated evaluation and imposes semantic constraints on the NP slot. We adopt a dual methodological approach, combining collostructional analysis to identify lexeme–construction associations with surprisal analysis using a large language model (LLM) (GPT-2) to assess predictive processing difficulty. The two methods complement each other, capturing both static distributional patterns and dynamic expectancy profiles. Three experimental manipulations were implemented: preposition alternation, variation in NP agentivity and variation in NP intentionality. Results show that NPs conforming to the hypothesized slot constraints yield lower surprisal values, whereas constraint-violating NPs trigger higher surprisal, aligning with the observed collostructional strengths. These findings provide empirical support for the view that constructional compatibility shapes predictive processing and contributes to integrating Construction Grammar (CxG) with prediction-based models of language processing.

This study investigates whether metaphors and similes are processed the same way or not. Comparison accounts of metaphor claim that metaphors and similes use the same cognitive mechanisms because metaphors are implicit similes, while Categorization accounts claim that the two figures of speech require different cognitive mechanisms. It is unclear which position has the most support. We address this by introducing the distinction between single and extended metaphors to this debate. Several experiments have shown that a metaphor preceded by another metaphor is read faster than a single metaphor. If similes in extended and non-extended contexts display a similar processing difference, this would support views saying that metaphors and similes are processed the same way. If not, it would be more in line with the view that they are processed differently. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we find that the difference between processing single and extended metaphors does not hold in the case of simile comprehension. This is more compatible with Categorization accounts than with Comparison accounts; if the cognitive mechanism behind metaphor and simile processing is the same, we would expect there to be a comparable processing difference between metaphors and similes in the single and extended conditions.