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.

Oxymorons combine two opposite terms in a paradoxical manner. They are closely intertwined with antonymy, since the union of antonymous items creates the paradoxical effect of the oxymoron and generates a new meaning. Compared to other forms of figurative language, oxymorons are largely underinvestigated. We explored what makes good oxymorons through a crowdsourcing task in which we asked participants to judge the acceptability, comprehensibility, effectiveness/aptness, commonness, pleasantness, and humoristic connotation of Italian adjective–noun oxymorons. We hypothesized that oxymorons featuring morphologically related antonyms (felice infelicità ‘happy unhappiness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons featuring morphologically unrelated antonyms (felice tristezza ‘happy sadness’) and that oxymorons constructed by complementaries (esatta inesattezza ‘exact inexactness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons constructed by contraries (bella bruttezza ‘beautiful ugliness’). The results confirmed only partially our hypotheses: oxymorons with complementaries were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, whereas no strong trend was found for the other two dimensions. Surprisingly, our analyses revealed that oxymoronic constructions containing morphologically unrelated words were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, pleasant, contradicting our initial expectations.

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.

Government attention selectively distributed to various issues in policy-making processes is usually reflected in language, such as metaphors in political discourse. In addition, metaphor change may reveal how conceptualizations of major topics such as economy and ecology evolve over time. After self-building a corpus of China’s 45-year Government Work Reports, this study explores whether there is a difference in attention to topics of economy and ecology over time and investigates the diachronic change of metaphor use on them based on a modified framework for diachronic metaphor change analysis. Results show that attention to economy has been steadily decreasing while attention to ecology has been growing, and that there is an increasing tendency of using more economy and ecology metaphors. Metaphor change on the use of source domains is arranged on a continuum, ranging from constant use (war for economy and ecology, and journey and object for economy), incremental change (living organism and building for economy and ecology, and object for ecology) to fundamental change (building and living organism for ecology). This study may enrich the understanding of diachronic metaphor change by providing a Chinese perspective on the metaphor use in government discourse over time.

Extensive evidence has demonstrated that bilinguals non-selectively activate lexicons of both languages when reading or hearing words in one language. Here, we further investigated the electrophysiological roles of cross-linguistic orthography and phonology in the processing of L2 spoken words in unbalanced Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in a cross-modal situation. Relative to unrelated control, the recognition of auditory L2 words showed behavioral interference effects when paired with orthographic or phonological neighbors of the correct translations of L2 words. Moreover, the lexical effects were also exhibited in the electrophysiological data, as reflected by marginally less positive late positive component (500–800 ms) amplitudes in the frontal region. Importantly, the orthographic rather than phonological translation neighbor condition elicited less negative N400 (300–500 ms) amplitudes in the parietal–occipital regions, suggesting that this orthographic translation neighbor condition facilitated the co-activation of spoken L2 words. Taken together, these findings indicate that cross-linguistic orthographic and phonological activation have different temporal dynamics with both bottom-up parallel cross-linguistic activation and the top-down inhibitory control mechanism governing the two-language lexical organization in L2 spoken word recognition.

Previous studies have brought conflicting results regarding the effects of valence and arousal in visual word processing. Some authors have pointed to participants’ individual differences as one of the possible explanations for these inconsistencies. The main aim of the present research was to examine whether participants’ individual differences in the level of epistemically unwarranted beliefs (EUB) contribute to these conflicting results. Therefore, participants who varied in their level of paranormal, pseudoscientific and conspiracy beliefs (assessed by self-report measures) performed a lexical decision task (LDT) and a recognition memory task. Linear mixed-effects models over LDT response times revealed that the effects of words’ emotional content (both valence and arousal) were modulated by the degree of individuals’ EUB. In addition, signal detection theory analyses showed that in the recognition task (but not in the LDT) response bias became more liberal as individuals’ EUB increased. These patterns of effects were not general to all EUB instances. The obtained results highlight the need to consider participants’ individual differences in affective word processing and signal detection. In addition, this study reveals some basic psychological mechanisms that would underlie EUB, a fact that has both theoretical and applied relevance.

Talmy’s motion event typology has served as a fruitful framework for exploring bilingual cognition and language use. The present study extends this line of research to the bilingualism situation of an underrepresented Turkic language, i.e., Modern Uyghur, and Mandarin Chinese, and it does so by focusing on a relatively understudied type of motion, i.e., caused motion. The two languages are genetically and typologically distinct, and yet they share verb-framing as an important lexicalization pattern in encoding motion. This study, therefore, investigated whether and to what extent this structural overlap contributes to crosslinguistic influence in Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion. Thirty Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ verbalizations were analyzed with respect to the number of semantic components expressed and the way they were syntactically packaged. Results were compared with relevant monolingual data, which showed that Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals displayed a strong L1 to L2 influence in syntactic packaging by overusing the verb-framed strategy in Mandarin Chinese. However, further comparisons with previous research on Uyghur–Chinese child and adult bilinguals’ motion construal revealed that, while structural overlap is a key factor motivating crosslinguistic influence, a coherent explanation of this phenomenon must consider more general principles of bilingual language processing and use.

The aim of this paper is to develop a Cognitive Grammar-based analysis of English Copy-raising (CR) constructions such as Richard seems like he is dancing. We argue that the notion of reference-point plays a crucial role in licensing the matrix-subject of the construction. In CR, with the epistemic verbs seem and appear, the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the pronominal copy (if a copy exists) in the embedded clause. The aboutness topicality of the matrix-subject in CR is expected, owing to its reference-point property. The epistemic CR construction is acceptable without a pronominal copy if the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the complement clause. The same type of analysis is applied to the CR construction with perceptual resemblance (PR) verbs – sound, look, feel, and smell – leading to the conclusion that the strong dichotomy between epistemic and PR verbs is illusory. It is further demonstrated that expletive there-raising in CR is motivated by the same reference-point phenomenon. The difference between there-raising and other CR examples stems from the role of there as a setting subject. Our reference-point-based analysis predicts a metonymic interpretation of the matrix-subject, which we attribute to the connection between reference-point and metonymy.

Monomorphemic words have been found to influence category formation, as they encode one general category and thus activate it more than other related categories in the same lexical network. On the other hand, multimorphemic words can encode multiple categories from the same network by the multiple forms they combine. Superordinate categories are encoded by sub-lexical forms (e.g., affixes), while the entire words encode lower categories in the hierarchical structure. In the present study, we asked whether sub-lexical forms influence the learning of the meaning encoded by the entire word they underlie. We used Semitic-like words where sub-lexical forms (syllabic patterns) encode superordinate categories of manner-of-motion, and the entire words encode lower-level categories (moving characters). In our main experiment, a word-learning test showed that a shared syllabic pattern had a negative effect on the learning of the moving characters encoded by the entire word. This effect was revealed mainly in dimensions related to the superordinate category encoded by the pattern. The effect and its direction are beyond the expectations of enhanced category representations suggested in previous literature. We conclude that the effect of word-form is beyond the specific category they encode and can have different directions at different hierarchical levels.

Word-object and action-object learning in children aged 30 to 48 months appears to develop at a similar time scale and adheres to similar attentional constraints. However, children below 36 months show different patterns of learning word-object and action-object associations when this information is presented in a bimodal context (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b). Here, we investigated 12- and 24-month-olds’ word-object and action-object learning when this information is presented in a unimodal context. Forty 12- and 24-month-olds were presented with two novel objects that were either first associated with a novel label (word learning task) and then later with a novel action (action learning task) or vice versa. In subsequent yoked test phases, children either heard one of the novel labels or saw a hand performing one of the actions presented with the two objects on screen while we measured their target looking. Generalized linear mixed models indicate that 12-month-olds learned action-object associations but not word-object associations and 24-month-olds learned neither word- nor action-object associations. These results extend previous findings (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b) and, together, suggest that children appear to learn action-object associations early in development while struggling with learning word-object associations in certain contexts until 2 years of age.

While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time.

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) holds that most conceptual metaphors are processed unconsciously. However, whether multiple words can be integrated into a holistic metaphoric sentence without consciousness remains controversial in cognitive science and psychology. This study aims to investigate the role of consciousness in processing Chinese nominal metaphoric sentences ‘A是B’ (A is[like] B) with a psychophysical experimental paradigm referred to as breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). We manipulated sentence types (metaphoric, literal and anomalous) and word forms (upright, inverted) in a two-staged experiment (CFS and non-CFS). No difference was found in the breakthrough times among all three types of sentences in the CFS stage, while literal sentences were detected more slowly than either metaphoric or anomalous sentences in the non-CFS stage. The results suggest that the integration of multiple words may not succeed without the participation of consciousness, let alone metaphoric processing. These findings may redefine ‘unconscious’ in CMT as ‘preconscious’ and support the indirect access view regarding how the metaphoric meaning is processed in the brain.

Speech-accompanying gestures have been shown to reduce cognitive load on a secondary task compared to speaking without gestures. In the current study, we investigate whether this benefit of speech-accompanying gestures is shared by speech-accompanying actions (i.e., movements that leave a lasting trace in the physical world). In two experiments, participants attempted to retain verbal and spatial information from a grid while describing a pattern while gesturing, while making the pattern, or while keeping hands still. Producing gestures reduced verbal load compared to keeping hands still when the pattern being described was visually present (Experiment 1), and this benefit was not shared by making the pattern. However, when the pattern being described was not visually present (Experiment 2), making the pattern benefited verbal load compared to keeping hands still. Neither experiment revealed a significant difference between gesture and action. Taken together, the findings suggest that moving the hands in meaningful ways can benefit verbal load.

How people communicate about motion events and how this is shaped by language typology are mostly studied with a focus on linguistic encoding in speech. Yet, human communication typically involves an interactional exchange of multimodal signals, such as hand gestures that have different affordances for representing event components. Here, we review recent empirical evidence on multimodal encoding of motion in speech and gesture to gain a deeper understanding of whether and how language typology shapes linguistic expressions in different modalities, and how this changes across different sensory modalities of input and interacts with other aspects of cognition. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that Talmy’s typology of event integration predicts multimodal event descriptions in speech and gesture and visual attention to event components prior to producing these descriptions. Furthermore, variability within the event itself, such as type and modality of stimuli, may override the influence of language typology, especially for expression of manner.

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation. Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.

Readers actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specific linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007; Madden & Zwaan, 2003). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and how it is connected to other dimensions of model construction. In three experiments, participants were asked to complete sentences with a choice of grammatical aspect form (perfective or imperfective). The test sentences systematically varied four dimensions of the sentence that were linked to grammatical aspect in different ways: telicity and transitivity (both linked through their semantic representations), subject animacy (linked through an inference over semantic representations), and related location information (linked through an inference grounded in world knowledge). In addition, to examine the influence of discourse function (backgrounding vs. foregrounding) on aspectual choice different construction types were varied across experiments – specifically a fronted locative construction and the presence of a generic narrative opener (Once upon a time). The results found that aspectual choice depends on information linked to the semantic representation of grammatical aspect; however, in contrast to previous work (e.g., Ferreti et al., 2007) information grounded in world knowledge (location information) did not influence aspectual choice except when it was integrated in a specialized discourse construction.

This paper offers an account of within- and between-language differences in the grammatical encoding of directive meaning as represented in yoga discourse in two cognate languages: Polish and Russian. Specifically, the focus is put on three constructions: the imperative and the imperfective non-past indicative in both languages, and the indicative past, which is utilised only in Russian. In the analysis, we make an eclectic selection of methodological tools, drawing on a few models of illocution which have been put forward within Cognitive Linguistics. As is shown, even if yoga instructions are generally assessed as relatively weak directives, there are fine-grained differences in some aspects of construal evoked by the examined constructions resulting in differences in the force impact among the respective patterns and in their distribution. In the analysis, we consider such aspects of construal as: (i) the actuality or virtuality of the event presented in the utterance; (ii) the presence or absence of the speaker in the onstage region; and (iii) the aspectual opposition between an ongoing or completed event. The analysis, which is both qualitative and quantitative, has been based on a corpus of 300 randomly selected instructions in each language (600 in total).

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.

Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb’s complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai et al., 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online and the timecourse of context effects remain unclear, but in our view it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e., descriptions of the utterance context used to infer the salient reading of the utterance. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in a self-paced reading study to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline task, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time.