Aims. Morphological skills in Williams syndrome (WS) are a controversial issue, particularly cross-linguistically. Methods. We assessed pluralization patterns of nouns, inflection of verbs in the past, and gender assignment, inflection, and agreement within the noun phrase in a sample of Spanish-speaking children with WS compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age (VA-TD) and on chronological age (CA-TD) age. Results. Children with WS attribute grammatical gender correctly in a production task, but they have problems with inferring the referent’s sex from the gender of the noun in a comprehension task. Additionally, they correctly pluralize nouns and properly inflect regular verbs, but they have problems with irregular verbs. Our findings suggest that they have mastered the productive rules, but they perform like younger children regarding irregular items.

Communicating information about our affective states is an important aspect of utterance meaning. Affective meanings can be expressed either explicitly or in an implicit way, for example by using particular linguistic structures like Creative Total Reduplication (CTR), the intentional and immediate repetition of a word (“It’s a little little cat”). We claim that, in addition to its explicit meaning (‘very little’), CTR conveys an affective meaning reflecting the speaker’s evaluation of the world as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant (“It’s a cute little cat”). The experiment reported here used a verification task with judgments of consistency. It aimed at verifying two hypotheses: first, the presence of CTR generates valued affective inferences; second, affective inferences are generated faster with CTR than with the simplex (i.e., non-reduplicated) form. Results strongly confirm the first hypothesis and disconfirm the second.

The influence of semantic context on verb argument structure processing was investigated in two experiments using both ERP and behavioral measures. Participants were presented with sentences ending with syntactically and/or semantically congruous or incongruous noun phrases and they were asked to judge the overall acceptability of the sentences. Syntactically incongruous sentences contained an intransitive verb followed by a direct object (e.g., *L’ennemi a conspiré (INTR) un complot *‘The enemy conspired a scheme’). In line with our hypothesis, results showed that the processing of syntactic incongruities was influenced by the degree of semantic congruency between the different sentence constituents (strong in Experiment 1 and weak in Experiment 2). Thus, the same syntactic incongruity was processed differently depending upon the semantic context of the sentence, thereby demonstrating the influence of semantic context on syntactic processing. We propose a linguistic account of the differential effects of verb transitivity as a function of the semantic context based upon Cognitive Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics.

Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet, for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensory modalities combine more easily than others. Many adjectives that are used to describe taste, for instance, can also be used for smell, but, less likely, for sound. These associations between sensory modalities as they are expressed in language are the topic of this study. We looked at the distribution of the combinations of dominant modalities in pairs of antonymic sensory adjectives (e.g., sweet–sour), and how the dominant modality of the adjectives in these pairs differed from that of the adjectives in isolation. In our dataset, there was a sizeable number of pairs consisting of adjectives with differing dominant modalities. Within those pairs, we observed that adjectives with the dominant modality sight can also be used for touch and vice versa. Similarly, adjectives with the dominant modality of smell can also be used for taste and vice versa. Finally, adjectives with the dominant modalities sight and touch can both also be used for hearing and for taste, but not the other way around. These results contribute to our understanding of how language is used to describe sensory experiences, and, with that, how sensory experiences may be shaped by the words that we use to describe them.

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. In this study, we focus on the creation and communication of figurative meaning in discursively situated and thematically organized verbal, gestural, and pictorial data published by an autistic artist in the form of videos and comics. Across three prominent experiential themes in the data, we isolate types of conceptualizations and generalize over mappings between target and source experiences. We find that the data are rich in figurative meaning expression (e.g., metaphor and metonymy) conveyed through language, co-speech gestures, and pictures in ways that are clearly embodied (experientially based) and that reflect affordances and constraints of these modes of communication. While our case study of meaning production does not contradict previous research on figurative meaning comprehension in populations, it does indicate benefits of taking a broader and multimodal approach to figurative meaning in research on ASD.

Several models of regularities behind plural overgeneralization patterns of four-year-old monolingual Germans and bi-/multilingual children acquiring German were empirically examined within the framework of single- and dual-route models. The factors taken into account were frequency, cue validity, productivity, and iconicity of plural allomorphs. In this large-scale cross-sectional study, the results of 893 children tested with a modified, validated version of the speech and language screening MSS and of 476 children tested with a validated language test SETK 3-5 were analyzed. For all overgeneralization models, paired groups of expected and not expected answers were compared in the Wilcoxon test. At the early stages of plural acquisition the frequency of plural allomorphs and the simplest phonetic–phonologically based regularities seem to be the crucial factors recognized by children acquiring German. Gender-based plural allomorph frequency was associated with advanced German skills. These findings support the single-route theory with its emphasis on the influence of input characteristics on children’s error patterns. No evidence was found for a default status of -s or any other plural marker, and hence for the dual-route theory.

The present study aimed at examining the perceptual span, the visual field area for information extraction within a single fixation, during the reading of traditional Chinese sentences. Native traditional Chinese readers’ eye-movements were recorded as they read sentences that were presented using a gaze-contingent technique, in which legible text was restricted within a window that moved in synchrony with the eyes, while characters outside the window were masked. Comparisons of the window conditions with a baseline condition in which no viewing constraint was applied showed that when the window revealed one previous character and three upcoming characters around the current fixation, reading speed and oculomotor activities reached peak performance. Compared to previous results with simplified Chinese reading, based on a similar set of materials, traditional Chinese exhibits a reduction of the perceptual span. We suggest that the visual complexity of a writing system likely influences the perceptual span during reading.

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 dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.

The aim of this study is to see how and to what extent the Talmyan notion of fictive motion is realized in the conceptual frame of speaking. Drawing from a previous in-depth analysis of the speaking event Manner component in English (cf. Vergaro, Sandford, Mastrofini, and Formisano, unpublished observations),1 we investigate the realization of fictive path in 186 English manner of speaking (henceforth MoS) verb entries accessed through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth COCA). Fictive path is always involved in the conceptualization of the speaking event. Communication is elaborated through the conduit metaphor, which is, in turn, motivated by the embodied act of speaking. Fictive path is further considered in relation to image schemas and windowing. Different degrees of path windowing emerge from this study, illustrating how the speaker focuses attention on a specific portion of the speaking event. Image schema distribution and an implicational hierarchy of the various types of path elaboration also become evident in this study.

Inflection impairments are commonly noted in aphasia, particularly non-fluent variants, where descriptions of such difficulties often focus on inflection omission. This aligns with rule-based theory, in which inflected forms should be more difficult to produce than their uninflected counterparts. Recent studies address noun inflection for number and potential effects of the relative frequency of singular and plural forms (dominance effects). However, none examine number errors qualitatively or in spontaneous speech. We present quantitative and qualitative analyses of such errors in nouns produced by twelve people with aphasia in spoken Cinderella narratives, examining: error rate; error types and nouns involved; relationship between error production and dominance; and speakers’ consistency with error production and flexibility in varying the noun forms concerned. Twelve unimpaired speakers provide comparison data. While error rates were low, arguably more important is error type. Singularisation and pluralisation errors were observed, all on regular nouns and involving production of the dominant form. The pluralisation errors, all occurring on references to Cinderella’s glass slipper, arguably challenge rule-based predictions that the singular is easier to retrieve than the plural. We suggest constructivist, usage-based theory as a promising framework to characterise such productions. Implications for aphasiology and clinical practice are also discussed.

A common feature of discourse coherence is hierarchical organization: more generally, central relations (characterizing the overall topic or goal) dominate complementary or modifying relations. In this hierarchy, higher levels tend to be marked by stronger prosodic cues than lower levels. This study seeks to understand how such a system emerges in human communication – what is present at the outset, and what takes time to develop. Specifically, we investigate whether the conceptualization of hierarchical organization precedes overt linguistic structuring, and whether distinct types and strengths of prosodic marking at different hierarchical levels can be discerned in the process of emergence. The only empirical evidence for such an investigation comes from sign languages, because they can arise de novo at any time. Sign languages offer the additional advantage of directly linking instantiations of linguistic structure to articulations of different visually perceived bodily articulators. Our study of a young sign language, Israeli Sign Language (ISL), finds that conceptual hierarchical structuring of discourse arises very early. However, the organization of bodily articulators to linguistically mark hierarchical information takes time to emerge: Younger ISL signers use smaller, less salient articulators at lower levels of the hierarchy compared to older signers.

Spatial descriptions such as “The spider is behind the bee” inform the listener about the location of the spider (the located object) in relation to an object whose location is known (i.e., the bee, also called the reference object). If the geometric properties of the reference object have been shown to affect how people use and understand spatial language (Carlson & Van Deman, 2008; Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin, 1994), the geometric features carried by the located object have been deemed irrelevant for spatial language (Landau, 1996; Talmy, 1983). This view on the (ir)relevance of the located object has been recently questioned by works showing that presenting the located object in misalignment with the reference object has consequences for spatial language understanding (Burigo, Coventry, Cangelosi, & Lynott, 2016; Burigo & Sacchi, 2013). In the reported study we aimed to investigate which geometric properties of the located object affect the apprehension of a spatial description, and to disentangle whether the information concerning its orientation (axis), direction (front/rear), or a combination of the two gives rise to conflict. The outcomes of three placing tasks suggest that only the information concerning the direction of the located object is critical for spatial language use.

There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

The present approach estimates the strength of intensifiers in Dutch by computing their information values in a language corpus, that is, contextual information content (Cohen Priva, 2008; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011) and Shannon Information (Shannon & Weaver, 1948), to respectively explain the use value and the expressive value of intensifiers when they intensify a predicative adjective. Conflicting strength values help in understanding the high number of intensifiers commonly available in particular languages and the constant need for adding new ones. Our approach underlines the relevance of two measures of information content (IC) for ranking intensifiers: (i) IC in context: the more combinatorial or transitional options an intensifier has, the higher its contextual information content and consequently its use value; and (ii) IC in relation to all alternative intensifiers: the higher the surprisal value that the occurrence of an intensifier evokes, the higher its expressive value. We shall investigate the validity of these two measures by researching a large corpus of Dutch tweets and shall test whether the values of these two measures can predict the stacking order in sequences of intensifiers.

Embodied theories of language posit that the human brain’s adaptations for language exploit pre-existing perceptual and motor mechanisms for interacting with the world. In this paper we propose an embodied account of the linguistic distinction between singular and plural, encoded in the system of grammatical number in many of the world’s languages. We introduce a neural network model of visual object classification and spatial attention, informed by a collection of findings in psychology and neuroscience. The classification component of the model computes the type associated with a visual stimulus without identifying the number of objects present. The distinction between singular and plural is made by a separate mechanism in the attentional system, which directs the classifier towards the local or global features of the stimulus. The classifier can directly deliver the semantics of uninflected concrete noun stems, while the attentional mechanism can directly deliver the semantics of singular and plural number features.

I discuss the perspectival nature of temporality in discourse and argue that the human concept of time can no more be dissociated from the perspectival thought than the concept of the self can. The corollary of this observation is that perspectival temporality can no more be excluded from the semantic representation than the notion of the self can: neither can be reduced to the bare referent for the purpose of semantic representation if the latter is to retain cognitive plausibility. I present such a semantic qua conceptual approach to temporal reference developed within my theory of Default Semantics. I build upon my theory of time as epistemic modality according to which, on the level of conceptual qua semantic building blocks, temporality reduces to degrees of detachment from the certainty of the here and the now. I also address the questions of temporal asymmetry between the past and the future, and the relation between metaphysical time (timeM), psychological time (timeE, where ‘E’ marks the domain of epistemological enquiry), and time in natural language (timeL), concluding that the perspective-infused timeE and timeL are compatible with timeM of mathematical models of spacetime: all are definable through possibility and perspectivity.

Objects can almost always be called by more than one name, and the name chosen depends on the context. However, studies of naming in some traditions elicit names by showing objects in isolation and asking merely What is it? If the names produced are not the same as those that would be given in more fully specified communicative contexts, the value of the tasks for understanding object naming is in doubt. The current study examined the effects of different communicative demands on naming of 60 household containers. A standard “free naming” task was contrasted with two other versions. In these two, participants had the goal of getting an addressee to find a target object among others. In one, each object needed to be distinguished from a small set of dissimilar objects, visible to the addressee. In the other, each needed to be distinguished from a large set of similar objects, not visible to the addressee. Responses were sensitive to context in the number of modifiers produced. However, they were insensitive in the head nouns produced. Simple naming tasks such as What is it? can produce results for head nouns equivalent to those from tasks providing more fully specified communicative contexts.

Comparison-induced distortion theory (Choplin 2007; Choplin and Hummel 2002) describes how comparison words like “better” suggest quantitative differences between compared values. When a comparison word is used to contrast a personal attribute value with some standard (e.g. “Your score is better than average”), the comparison-suggested difference for the word may bias estimates or recall of personal attribute values. Three studies investigated how comparison-suggested differences determine the effect of social comparison on estimates or recall of personal attribute values. The first study demonstrated that estimates of attributes are biased towards (assimilation) or away from (contrast) a comparison standard depending on whether the difference between the compared attribute values exceeds or falls below the comparison-suggested difference. The second study showed that the comparison language selected by participants (through the difference suggested by the language) mediated the effect of standard similarity on attribute estimates following a social comparison. The third study demonstrated concurrent assimilation and contrast effects in recall of attribute values due to the size of the observed difference between the self and the standard for the attribute. Unlike in previous research on social comparison, assimilation and contrast patterns in these studies can be explained through a single process.

An extensive literature going back three quarters of a century holds that metaphorical mappings between sensory domains conform to a hierarchy of the senses, such that mappings from ‘low’ senses (touch, taste) to ‘high’ senses (sight, sound) are preferred over mappings in the opposite direction. Recent work has established that these directional preferences are partially explained by lexical factors. Theorists have also proposed that perceptual factors play a role in directional preferences, but without testing these factors directly and without controlling for the established effects of lexical factors. This article uses a novel construction, the verbal analogy (e.g., The picture looks like my music sounds), to explore directional preferences while controlling for several crucial lexical factors. A naturalness rating experiment reveals local directional preferences, for mappings between touch and sound and between sight and sound. The experiment finds no evidence for a general preference for mappings in either direction of the purported hierarchy of the senses, suggesting that pervious empirical findings may have been mediated by the effects of lexical factors.