Abstract domains of knowledge may have social origins. However, whether abstract concepts (ACs) may also differentially affect communicative interaction and conversation has not been explored. Here, we studied ACs’ communicative functions by collecting in an Italian and an English sample, ratings for concrete concept (CC) and ACs related to three main dimensions: communicative/pragmatic [i.e., Openness to Negotiation (ON), Easiness to Start a Conversation (ESC)], semantic/metacognitive [i.e., Social Metacognition (SM) – perceived need of others, Word Confidence (WC), Contextual Availability (CA)], and emotional–experiential (i.e., Pleasantness, Valence, Familiarity). Overall, Italian participants judged it was easier to start a conversation, the more pleasant, familiar, and positively valenced were rated the concepts. Crucially, at lower values of the emotional–experiential component (i.e., Familiarity in the Italian sample, also Pleasantness and Valence in an English sample), there was an advantage of ACs over CCs in the ESC. Moreover, in the Italian sample, participants rated ACs higher on SM, ON, and lower on WC and CA. Notably, in both the Italian and English sample, ACs with higher ratings on the ESC dimension belonged to the Self-Sociality subcluster. The results offer new insights into the pragmatic aspects linked to ACs’ use.

While eating is universally salient, food habits vary greatly even across similar western cultural groups. Italians, for example, are renowned pasta consumers whereas this habit is less pervasive in other western cultures. This variability might shape the conceptualization of food of different cultural groups. Against this backdrop, it has been proposed the semantic representation of food is universally organized along two main axes, with natural food (e.g., vegetables, fruit) relying more on sensory properties and manufactured food (e.g., pasta) relying more on functional properties. In this exploratory study, we compared the semantic representation of pasta, vegetables, and fruit across Italian and English-speaking participants with a free-listing task. We find the representation of pasta is not restricted to functional properties. Moreover, Italian and English speakers differed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their representation of pasta. Italians produced more exemplars of pasta than English-speaking participants, and their conceptual organization of pasta also included fine-grained distinctions (e.g., egg-based vs. flour-and-water pasta), whereas English-speaking participants mostly focused on perceptual components (e.g., long) – even when accounting for differential consumption, cooking, and preparation experience of pasta. Our results suggest that culture-specific experiences can shape the conceptualization of food.

This study explored the flexibility of the orthographic processing at parafoveal level by manipulating the relationship between flankers and targets in two lexical decision tasks. In the first, we presented the following flankers: (1) the same words as targets (farola farola farola); (2) targets with transposed non-adjacent letters (falora farola falora); (3) the targets with one different letter (fapola farola fapola); and (4) unrelated pseudowords as control stimuli (pilata farola pilata). The results show significant facilitatory effects for all three experimental conditions in comparison to the Unrelated one, as well as differences between the Transposed and One Different Letter when compared to the Identity condition. In the second experiment, the procedure was the same but with the following modifications: the transposed non-adjacent letters were vowels instead of consonants (forala farola forala), and we also presented a condition in which both vowels and consonants were transposed (folara farola folara). The results of the response latencies showed that all the experimental conditions generated facilitatory effects in comparison to the Unrelated condition, with no differences between them, although the analyses of the error rates additionally showed significant differences between the Identity and the Transposed and Vowel and Consonant Transposed conditions. These two experiments are interpreted in terms of a highly flexible orthographic processing of flankers at parafoveal level, both in relation to letter ordering and letter identification.

Switching between two concurrent tasks is an important ability of the mind. In a series of two experiments, we explored the role of activation (arousal and subjective significance) and emotional valence in shaping the effectiveness of switching between two cognitive tasks: gender-marking and emotional categorisations of verbal stimuli. We expected arousal to disrupt and subjective significance to boost the effectiveness of cognitive switching. We employed a paradigm that allowed us to present emotional words and measure the reaction latencies when a task given to the participants was switched; thus, the response was more costly than when continuing to respond to the same task. The first experiment, conducted with neutral words, showed that high subjective significance reduced reaction latencies in comparison with medium subjective significance. The second experiment showed a similar pattern only for neutral stimuli in the emotional categorisation task, but not for negative and positive stimuli. We did not find a clear effect of arousal or valence. The results of our studies suggest that subjective significance is independent of arousal in enhancing the cognitive control resources.

Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of iconicity is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We collected iconicity measures for 304 Japanese words from English-speaking participants, using rating and guessing tasks. The words included ideophones (structurally marked depictive words) along with regular lexical items from similar semantic domains (e.g., fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’). The two measures correlated, speaking to their validity. However, ideophones received consistently higher iconicity ratings than other items, even when guessed at the same accuracies, suggesting the rating task is more sensitive to cues like structural markedness that frame words as iconic. These cues did not always guide participants to the meanings of ideophones in the guessing task, but they did make them more confident in their guesses, even when they were wrong. Consistently poor guessing results reflect the role different experiences play in shaping construals of iconicity. Using multiple measures in tandem allows us to explore the interplay between iconicity and these external factors. To facilitate this, we introduce a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing tasks from standardised wordlists, while also making improvements to the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches.

In this study, we propose an operationalization of the concept of emergence which plays a crucial role in usage-based theories of language. The abstractions linguists operate with are assumed to emerge through a process of generalization over the data language users are exposed to. Here, we use two types of computational learning algorithms that differ in how they formalize and execute generalization and, consequently, abstraction, to probe whether a type of language knowledge that resembles linguistic abstractions could emerge from exposure to raw data only. More specifically, we investigated whether a phone, undisputedly the simplest of all linguistic abstractions, could emerge from exposure to speech sounds using two computational learning processes: memory-based learning and error-correction learning (ECL). Both models were presented with a significant amount of pre-processed speech produced by one speaker. We assessed (1) the consistency or stability of what these simple models learn and (2) their ability to approximate abstract categories. Both types of models fare differently regarding these tests. We show that only ECL models can learn abstractions and that at least part of the phone inventory and its grouping into traditional types can be reliably identified from the input.

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.

An open question in research on multimodal figuration is how to mitigate the analyst’s bias in identifying and interpreting metaphor and metonymy; an issue that determines the generalizability of the findings. Little is known about the causes that motivate different annotations. Inter-rater reliability tests are useful to investigate the sources of variation in annotations by independent researchers that can help inform and refine protocols.

Inspired by existing procedures for verbal, visual, and filmic metaphor identification, we formulated instructions to identify multimodal metaphor and metonymy and tested it against a corpus of 21 generic advertisements and 21 genre-specific advertisements (mobile phones). Two independent researchers annotated the advertisements in six rounds. A joint discussion followed each round to consider conflicting annotations and refine the protocol for the ensuing round.

By examining the evolution of inter-rater reliability results, we found that (1) we reached similar levels of agreement for the identification of metaphor and metonymy, although converging on the interpretation of metonymy was more difficult; (2) some genre specificities made it easier to agree on the annotations for mobile advertisements than for the general advertisements; and (3) there was a consistent increase in the kappa scores reaching substantial agreement by the sixth round.

This research probed how classifiers marking an object’s membership in the grammar of classifier languages like Mandarin Chinese and Korean may influence their speakers to categorize objects differently compared to speakers of non-classifier languages like English. Surveys in multiple-choice format were given to native speakers of the three languages. Analysis of the results demonstrated that significant proportions of Mandarin Chinese and Korean speakers behaved differently from English speakers due to the classifier-based strategy influencing classifier language speakers’ categorization. Adopting the Competition Model, we suggest that among the various categorizing strategies available to language users, the one with the greatest strength at the moment of performing the task wins the categorization competition. Classifiers that are grammaticalized in classifier languages may be providing their speakers with a powerful cognitive tool to notice diverse characteristics shared between objects, which is usually unavailable to non-classifier languages. Therefore, the strength of classifier-based strategy in the minds of classifier language speakers is strong enough to win some of the categorization competitions, which guides them to make different categorizing decisions from non-classifier language users.

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.

How much information do language users need to differentiate potentially absolute synonyms into near-synonyms? How consistent must the information be? We present two simple experiments designed to investigate this. After exposure to two novel verbs, participants generalized them to positive or negative contexts. In Experiment 1, there was a tendency across conditions for the verbs to become differentiated by context, even following inconsistent, random, or neutral information about context during exposure. While a subset of participants matched input probabilities, a high proportion did not. As a consequence, the overall pattern was of growth in differentiation that did not closely track input distributions. Rather, there were two main patterns: When each verb had been presented consistently in a positive or negative context, participants overwhelmingly specialized both verbs in their output. When this was not the case, the verbs tended to become partially differentiated, with one becoming specialized and the other remaining less specialized. Experiment 2 replicated and expanded on Experiment 1 with the addition of a pragmatic judgment task and neutral contexts at test. Its results were consistent with Experiment 1 in supporting the conclusion that quality of input may be more important than quantity in the differentiation of synonyms.

Research has shown sound-symbolic associations between speech sounds and conceptual and/or perceptual properties of a referent. This study used the choice response time method to investigate hypothesized associations between a high/low vowel and spatial concepts of up/down and above/below. The participants were presented with a stimulus that moved either upward or downward (Experiments 1 and 2), or that was located above or below the reference stimulus (Experiment 3), and they had to pronounce a vowel ([i] or [æ]) based on the spatial location of the stimulus. The study showed that the high vowel [i] was produced faster in relation to the up-directed and the above-positioned stimulus, while the low vowel [æ] was produced faster in relation to the down-directed and the below-positioned stimulus. In addition, the study replicated the pitch-elevation effect showing a raising of the vocalization pitch when vocalizations were produced to the up-directed stimulus. The article discusses these effects in terms of the involvement of sensorimotor processes in representing spatial concepts.