Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categorized as VISUAL, MOTION, and SOUND. Seventeen native speakers of Pastaza Kichwa listened to audio clips of ideophones extracted from sentential contexts. Subjects’ neural activity was assessed using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results demonstrate that these posited semantic categories activate areas of the brain associated with visualization, motion, and sound processing and production, respectively. This suggests that these ideophones convey semantic information related to these concepts, independent of context. This contrasts with what would be expected by theories suggesting that ideophones on their own are semantically empty. The data give rise to questions regarding whether any language contains only sound ideophones that do not carry additional sensory information and whether ideophones in previous studies treated strictly as sound ideophones might require greater specification of their semantics, specifically from a multisensorial perspective.

Research using masked priming and parafoveal preview techniques has shown that visual letter similarity has an impact on word processing during the initial stages in Latin-derived scripts. However, these effects appear to be absent in Arabic. One reason for this discrepancy could be attributed to the distinctive features of the Arabic script, which includes numerous letters sharing a basic form while varying in the location or number of diacritics. To shed light on this issue, the present study employed Arabic letters rather than words in two masked priming experiments: an alphabetic decision task and a letter-matching task. Both experiments showed that visually similar letters were more effective as primes than visually dissimilar letters. These findings suggest that the processes of letter identification in Arabic and Latin scripts may be roughly alike, implying that differences in visual letter similarity across scripts may arise at later stages of processing.

Arbib's How the brain got language is a major achievement in defining a trajectory for the evolution of complex imitation and the language-ready brain leading to human language. In addition to these capabilities, I will suggest that it is useful to consider two additional components of human brain function that are intricately related to the emergence of language. These are, first, the profound human motivation to represent and share the psychological states of others, and second, the related complex semantic system that represents the contents of what is communicated in language. In this sense, these two components represent part of what is under the iceberg, where language is the emerging tip.

Music and language are unique communication tools in human society, where stress plays a crucial role. Many studies have examined the recognition of lexical stress in Indo-European languages using beat/rhythm priming, but few studies have examined the cross-domain relationship between musical and linguistic stress in tonal languages. The current study investigates how musical stress and lexical stress influence lexical stress recognition in Mandarin. In the auditory priming experiment, disyllabic Mandarin words with initial or final stress were primed by disyllabic words or beats with either congruent or incongruent stress patterns. Results showed that the incongruent condition elicited larger P2 and the late positive component (LPC) amplitudes than the congruent condition. Moreover, the Strong-Weak primes elicited larger N400 amplitudes than the Weak-Strong primes, and the Weak-Strong primes yielded larger LPC amplitudes than the Strong-Weak primes. The findings reveal the neural correlates of the cross-domain influence between music and language during lexical stress recognition in Mandarin.

Although there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

In this article, I will comment on recent advances in the research on the intersection between language and action. On the basis of the argument proposed by Arbib, I will consider an evolutionary scenario according to which language emerged from a basic imitation mechanism devoted to action representation. I will review more appropriate data in patients who present with gesture and language disorders and add it to behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging evidence that suggests that specialized sensorimotor circuits underlie action processing and may ultimately even ground complex aspects of language. Finally, in the last part of the article, I will discuss some of the future research on the interwoven processes of production and comprehension that are involved in the predictive mechanisms of action and language.

In this study, our objective was to explore the impact of hearing loss on the conceptual system underlying word meaning. We collected perceptual strength norms for 200 Italian words from early deaf individuals with limited or no access to auditory information and compared them to existing norms from hearing individuals. For each word, participants provided perceptual strength ratings for each perceptual modality. Our results revealed a significant reduction of the auditory modality in the norms provided by deaf individuals compared to the hearing population. However, we did not observe an overall decrease in reported perceptual strength. Interestingly, we found a heightened involvement of other sensory modalities accompanied by reduced modality exclusivity in the conceptualization of words, indicating that deaf individuals heavily rely on information coming from the other perceptual modalities to form concepts. These findings suggest that hearing loss leads to a reorganisation of word conceptualization, characterised by increased multisensoriality. Importantly, although diminished, the auditory modality remains present, suggesting that deaf individuals can still infer auditory-associated knowledge about words to some extent.

The ability to imitate speech is linked to individual cognitive abilities such as working memory and the auditory processing of music. However, little research has focused on the role of specific components of musical perception aptitude in relation to an individual’s native language from a crosslinguistic perspective. This study explores the predictive role of four components of musical perception skills and working memory on phonetic language abilities for speakers of two typologically different languages, Catalan (an intonation language) and Chinese (a tone language). Sixty-one Catalan and 144 Chinese participants completed four subtests (accent, melody, pitch and rhythm) of the Profile of Music Perception Skills, a forward digit span task and a speech imitation task. The results showed that for both groups of participants, musical perception skills predicted speech imitation accuracy but working memory did not. Importantly, among the components of musical perception skills, accent was the only predictive factor for Chinese speakers, whereas melody was the only predictive factor for Catalan speakers. These findings suggest that speech imitation ability is predicted by musical perception skills rather than working memory and that the predictive role of specific musical components may depend on the phonological properties of the native language.

Words can be matched with the concept of sign (correspondence of a signifier to a signified) as long as they act as symbol-words endowed with some semantic self-sufficiency. But in discourse, they lose their wholeness as symbol-words and metamorphose into wording-symbols. They, suddenly, appear as mere signifier entities with a more or less loose allusion to their status as cultural symbols. In discourse, words are no longer signs but tools covering ephemeral collections of neurosemes: the link of the sign breaks as soon as discourse takes over. The referential potential is no longer the schematic meaning issued from culture, but the universe of discourse under construction. This is why any attempt to account for meaning in language must integrate the neural process of meaning creation. It is now established that meaning is not the result of language activity but the result of cognition. However, what language does, via discourse, is to make this meaning communicable. For all these reasons, the task of linguistics should be to investigate the relationship between cognition and linguistic output in order to shed light on all the cognitive traces left within the surface strings. The role of morphosyntax thus has to be re-evaluated in this light.

In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. To do so, referential and relational coherence must be established in order to construct a connected discourse. The objective of this follow-up eye-tracking study (N = 72) is to explore the existence of an interaction effect between two factors: (a) the extension of the referent (short and long antecedent), and (b) the semantic relation (counter-argumentative a pesar de, and causal por), when processing the neuter pronoun ello in texts written in Spanish. No previous study has systematically compared the on-line processing of texts in which different extensions of the encapsulated anaphoric antecedent by the neuter pronoun ello (‘this’ or ‘it’ in English) are presented in diverse marked semantic relations (causal and counter-argumentative). Based on three eye-tracking measures, we found distinctive patterns of reading behavior when anaphoric neuter reference and semantic relations must be processed conjointly in order to construct a coherent mental representation. The main findings show that reading longer and more complex antecedents encapsulated by the neutral pronouns ello exerts more cognitive effort in late processing (Look Back measure), particularly when simultaneously and in the same discourse construction there is an explicitly marked counter-argumentative semantic relation. Implications for theories of referential and relational coherence are discussed.

Recent years have seen a heightened interest in the interface between language use and cognition in language learners. In this study, we investigate this interface further by conducting a rating task experiment on the intuitions of 25 native speakers and 101 low–intermediate to advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language regarding the acceptability of the genitive variants (the beauty of nature/nature’s beauty) in different contexts. These ratings were then compared against existing corpus-based statistical models that predict which variant is most likely in spoken language use with two mixed-effects linear regression models. The first model focused on the animacy of the possessor in particular, which has been found to have a different effect on native speakers and EFL learners in language use, whereas the second model tested how the ratings relate to the predictions as a whole. Results show that there is a larger discrepancy between language use and intuitions of low-proficiency learners compared to native speakers, which is partially because animate, collective, and inanimate possessors affect the intuitions and the language use of learners differently.

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 tasks assessing their abilities to map singular and plural markers to their visual referents and to distinguish one object from more than one. Results showed that both groups of children correctly mapped plural markers to their referents but failed to map singular ones. Furthermore, results also indicated that both groups also looked at collections of more than one object with four objects but not at those with two. The eye movement patterns of children who looked at collections of more than one object suggest a counting-like strategy. These results indicate that comprehension of plural markers of children with DS is similar to that of their typically developing peers; however, it is not related to their numerical abilities.

This article compares risk tolerance of native Arabic speakers under two language contexts: their first language (L1 Arabic) and their foreign language (L2 English). We aim to evaluate whether thinking in a foreign language actually reduces the negative effects of cognitive biases, such as loss aversion and mental accounting, on financial decision-making. Toward this aim, we conducted two experiments in which the risk tolerance levels of 144 participants were evaluated across four different types of decision-making problems: the Asian disease problem, the financial crisis problem, the discount problem, and the ticket/money lost problem. In study 1, we adopted Keysar et al.’s (2012, Psychological Science, 23, 661–668) experiment to test the effect of L2 on framing effects associated with loss aversion, and in Study 2, we adopted Costa et al.’s (2014, Cognition, 130, 236–254) experiment to test the effect of L2 on framing effects associated with mental accounting biases. We found that individuals were risk-averse for gains and risk-seeking for losses when presented with choices in their L1, but were almost unaffected by framing manipulation under the L2 condition. When it came to mental accounting, however, framing effects were nearly absent in both L1 and L2 conditions. In our investigation, we examined various potential factors that could explain the foreign language effect on decision-making. The primary factor that appears to account for this linguistic phenomenon is the heightened cognitive and emotional distance experienced when using an L2.

Embodied imagery hypothesis proposes the activation of perceptual-motor systems during language processing. Previous studies primarily used concrete visual stimuli to investigate mental imagery in language processing by native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners, but few studies employed schematic diagrams. The study aims to investigate mental imagery in processing prepositional phrases by English NSs and L2 learners. Using image-schematic diagrams as primes, we examine whether any mental imagery effect is modulated by target preposition (over, in), the abstractness of meaning (spatial, extended), and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 1,040 ms, 2,040 ms). A total of 79 adult L2 learners and 100 NSs of English completed diagram–picture matching and semantic priming phrasal decision tasks. Results revealed interference effects on L2 processing of over phrases and under 2,040 ms SOA, but no such effects were observed in the NS group. The selective interference effects in L2 suggest different mental imagery patterns between L1 and L2 processing, and processing schematic diagram primes requires high cognitive demands, potentially leading to difficulties in integrating visual and linguistic information and making grammaticality judgments. The findings partially validate schematic diagrams as visual representations of concepts and suggest the need for further examination of schematic diagrams with varying degrees of complexity.

How the time reference of a sentence is processed based on the grammatical marking of the verb has already been explored in several languages with grammatical tense and aspect. It can also be grammatically expressed according to the reality status of the event (whether the event exists in time, realis mood, or not, irrealis). This study reports results from an acceptability judgment experiment in Paiwan, a Formosan language which exhibits a realis-perfective/irrealis distinction. By placing realis-perfective and irrealis markers after deictic past or future time adverbs and manipulating the grammaticality of the sentences, we asked which temporal concord violation (i.e., realis-perfective or irrealis) was harder to detect. The temporal concord violation of the realis-perfective marker induced greater processing difficulties (interactions between time reference and mood marking revealed lower accuracy rates and longer reaction time), but not the irrealis marker, in line with previous hypotheses. These processing difficulties may be partly due to the Paiwan realis mood marker which also encodes perfective aspect meaning. The reanalysis of the design of previous studies indicates that the interaction with perfective aspect also led to additional processing cost, suggesting that perfective aspect marking plays a crucial role in the processing of time reference.

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 further by means of a second experiment, a conceptual feature rating task. The aim of this task was to assess if the cognition-related meanings of tundma differ from other cognition verbs of Estonian (teadma ‘to know’, aru saama ‘to understand’) in that they are metaphorically linked to physical perception. It was predicted that native speakers use characteristics tied to the physical perception in the conceptualisation of the type of knowledge expressed by tundma. However, native speakers did not rate sentences with tundma as more physical than sentences with abstract cognition verbs. This result is indicative of the nature of the semantics of tundma being more varied than was first thought. It is argued that the semantics of tundma refer to it being a verb of general proximal perception.

This article sheds light on the significant yet nuanced roles of shame and guilt in influencing moral behaviour, a phenomenon that became particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic with the community’s heightened desire to be seen as moral. These emotions are central to human interactions, and the question of how they are conveyed linguistically is a vast and important one. Our study contributes to this area by analysing the discourses around shame and guilt in English and Japanese online forums, focusing on the terms shame, guilt, haji (‘shame’) and zaiakukan (‘guilt’). We utilise a mix of corpus-based methods and natural language processing tools, including word embeddings, to examine the contexts of these emotion terms and identify semantically similar expressions. Our findings indicate both overlaps and distinct differences in the semantic landscapes of shame and guilt within and across the two languages, highlighting nuanced ways in which these emotions are expressed and distinguished. This investigation provides insights into the complex dynamics between emotion words and the internal states they denote, suggesting avenues for further research in this linguistically rich area.

Social hierarchical information impacts language comprehension. Nevertheless, the specific process underlying the integration of linguistic and extralinguistic sources of social hierarchical information has not been identified. For example, the Chinese social hierarchical verb 赡养, /shan4yang3/, ‘support: provide for the needs and comfort of one’s elders’, only allows its Agent to have a lower social status than the Patient. Using eye-tracking, we examined the precise time course of the integration of these semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs and extralinguistic social hierarchical information during natural reading. A 2 (Verb Type: hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical) × 2 (Social Hierarchy Sequence: match vs. mismatch) design was constructed to investigate the effect of the interaction on early and late eye-tracking measures. Thirty-two participants (15 males; age range: 18–24 years) read sentences and judged the plausibility of each sentence. The results showed that violations of semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs induced shorter first fixation duration but longer regression path duration and longer total reading time on sentence-final nouns (NP2). These differences were absent under non-hierarchical conditions. The results suggest that a mismatch between linguistic and extralinguistic social hierarchical information is immediately detected and processed.