This study explores the relationship between executive functioning (EF) and degree of bilingualism in a sample (N = 79) of 5- to 7-year-old monolingual and bilingual children. The bilingual group included children who are fully fluent in two languages (balanced bilinguals) and children who are still learning their second language (dual-language learners (DLLs). In general, findings revealed mixed associations between bilingualism and EF. There were no language group differences for one type of simple inhibitory control (i.e., go or no-go task). However, a bilingual advantage was demonstrated for another type of simple inhibitory control (the Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders task), for complex inhibitory control (i.e., the Simon effect), and for cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort). Effects were found when DLLs and balanced bilinguals were analyzed separately, and the latter two effects were found when both types of bilinguals were compared to monolinguals. The findings contribute to the growing literature examining a possible bilingual effect in early childhood.

We investigated how deictic shifts and memory representation influence production difficulties in reported speech. In Experiment 1, participants read short stories, including a conversation between two protagonists. Participants then recalled the last sentence from the conversation in either direct or indirect speech. When participants had verbatim memory of the to-be-reported utterance, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if indirect speech production required a deictic shift. If participants had verbatim memory and indirect speech production did not require a deictic shift, direct and indirect speech’s speech latencies were similar. In Experiment 2, we investigated the production difficulties of reported speech when verbatim memory was unavailable to participants. First, participants read short stories. Next, half of the participants completed an intervening task, whereas the other half did not. Last, participants undertook a sentence completion task by filling in a missing word in direct or indirect speech. When participants did not have verbatim memory of to-be-reported utterances, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if a deictic shift was needed to produce direct speech. These results suggest that production difficulties in reported speech depend on how to-be-reported utterances are represented in memory and whether deictic shifts are required.

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.

Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten ‘put’ pst-pl with zetten ‘put’ prs-pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet ‘have put’). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change.

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.

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.

This study aims at investigating the Turkish emotion concept heyecan (i.e., thrill, excitement, and nervousness), which can be used with different semantic contents depending on the context. The conceptual metaphor theory frames this analysis to reveal the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of heyecan. For this purpose, the lemma heyecan is searched in the Turkish National Corpus, and 700 concordance lines gathered from the corpus are examined through the metaphor identification procedure to identify the source domains and interpret the conceptual coding. The findings reveal a folk model of heyecan in which several metaphors and metonymies characterize different dimensions of it: arousal–existence–disappearance, intensity–passivity, control, cause–effect, and individual–social. Qualitative and quantitative findings embody various linguistic metaphors that can be grouped under several source domain categories including substance in a container, location, and object as the most frequent ones, whereas physiological effect is the most frequent metonymy. The metaphors and metonymies are discussed with their examples in this study. The concordance lines show several emotion terms that heyecan is collocated with, among which the emotion families of ‘fear’ and ‘happiness’ outnumber the rest. This study demonstrates how corpus data are helpful in pinpointing the conceptual content of an emotion term in a coherent way.

Young children sometimes incorrectly interpret verbs that have a “result” meaning, such as understanding ‘fill’ to refer to adding liquid to a cup rather than filling it to a particular level. Given cross-linguistic differences in how event components are realized in language, past research has attributed such errors to non-adultlike event-language mappings. In the current study, we explore whether these errors have a non-linguistic origin. That is, when children view an event, is their encoding of the event end-state too imprecise to discriminate between events that do versus do not arrive at their intended endpoints? Using a habituation paradigm, we tested whether 13-month-old English-learning infants (N = 86) discriminated events with different degrees of completion (e.g., draw a complete triangle versus draw most of a triangle). Results indicated successful discrimination, suggesting that sensitivity to the precise event end-state is already in place in early infancy. Thus, our results rule out one possible explanation for children’s errors with change-of-state predicates—that they do not notice the difference between end-states that vary in completion.

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.

While the Talmian dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages has been amply studied for motion events, it has been less discussed for locative events, even if Talmy considers these to be included in motion events. This paper discusses such locative events, starting from the significant cross-linguistic variation among Dutch, French, and English. Dutch habitually encodes location via cardinal posture verbs (CPVs; ‘SIT’, ‘LIE’, ‘STAND’) expressing the orientation of the Figure, French prefers orientation-neutral existence verbs like être ‘be’ and English – unlike for motion events – straddles the middle with a marked preference for be but the possibility to occasionally rely on CPVs. Through the analysis of recognition performances and gazing behaviours in a non-verbal recognition task, this study confirms a (subtle) cognitive impact of different linguistic preferences on the mental representation of locative events. More specifically, they confirm the continuum suggested by Lemmens (2005, Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais (pp. 223–244). Publications de l’Université St Etienne.) for the domain of location with French on the one extreme and Dutch on the other with English in-between, behaving like French in some contexts but like Dutch in others.

Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I propose a study of aesthetic emotional expressions in Japanese. With this aim, I have created a medium-sized corpus (c100,000 running words) of travellers’ reviews in Japanese published on TripAdvisor between 2012 and 2022. The corpus consists of 1,100 reviews, grouped into three subsections, corresponding to three of the most visited landmarks in Japan (namely, Mount Fuji, Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine, and the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome). The reviews chosen for this research include at least one reference, either literal or figurative, to the users’ aesthetic evaluation of their visit. My list of aesthetic emotions consists of four large categories: emotions of pleasure (e.g., attraction, fluency), emotions of contemplation (e.g., interest, intrigue), emotions of amazement (e.g., awe, wonder), and emotions of respect (e.g., admiration, adoration). For each aesthetic emotion, I have identified a series of source domains, which I analyse in detail in my discussion. As my data shows, many of our aesthetic expressions are rooted in the psychological and behavioural changes triggered by these emotions and, therefore, should be considered embodied. More importantly, through the analysis of the conceptual mappings involved in these linguistic expressions, it can be affirmed that aesthetic reactions are sensitive to cultural influences and, thus, they are not necessarily universal.