There is a distinction between languages that use the duration is length metaphor, like English (e.g., long time), and languages like Spanish that conceptualise time using the duration is quantity metaphor (e.g., much time). The present study examines the use of both metaphors, exploring their multimodal behaviour in Spanish speakers. We analyse co-speech gesture patterns in the TV news setting, using data from the NewsScape Library, that co-occur with expressions that trigger the duration is quantity construal (e.g., durante todo ‘during the whole’) and the duration is length construal in the from X to Y construction (e.g., desde el principio hasta el final ‘from beginning to end’). Results show that both metaphors tend to co-occur with a semantic gesture, with a preference for the lateral axis, as reported in previous studies. However, our data also indicate that the direction of the gesture changes depending on the construal. The duration is quantity metaphor tends to be performed with gestures with an outwards direction, in contrast with the duration is length construal, which employ a left-to-right directionality. These differences in gesture realisation point to the existence of different construals for the concept of temporal duration.

We present two studies exploring how participants respond when a speaker contrasts two ideas, then expresses an ambiguous preference towards one of them. Study 1 showed that, when reading a speaker’s preference as text, participants tended to choose whatever was said last as matching the speaker’s preference, reflecting the recent-mention bias of anaphora resolution. In Study 2, we asked whether this pattern changed for audio versions of our stimuli. We found that it did not. We then asked whether observers used gesture to disambiguate the speaker’s preference. Participants watched videos in which two statements were spoken. Co-speech gestures were produced during each statement, in two different locations. Next, an ambiguous preference for one option was spoken. In ‘gesture disambiguating’ trials, this statement was accompanied by a gesture in the same spatial location as the gesture accompanying the first statement. In ‘gesture non-disambiguating’ trials, no third gesture occurred. Participants chose the first statement as matching the speaker’s preference more often for gesture disambiguating compared to non-disambiguating trials. Our findings add to the literature on resolution of ambiguous anaphoric reference involving concrete entities and discourse deixis, and we extend this literature to show that gestures indexing abstract ideas are also used during discourse comprehension.

The present study explores how language learners apply gender stereotypes in learning a novel language with grammatical gender. Adult, English-speaking participants were exposed to picture–sound pairs from a miniature language. Each picture was of a matched gendered professional (e.g., male tennis player, female tennis player) with a nonsense form [CVCV-go/gu]. Participants were exposed to 32 picture–sound pairs (16 male, and 16 female, all matched) five times in a randomized order. Following training, participants were given a two-alternative forced-choice test with novel picture–word pairs. Participants were presented with a novel picture paired with two words (e.g., [befegu vs. befebo]) and were asked to choose which word most likely portrayed the meaning conveyed by the picture. These novel items contained gender-matched professions (e.g., male and female chemist), neutral items (office supplies), stereotypically female items (makeup), and stereotypically male items (tools). Participants assigned the appropriate gender to the novel professions, and assigned gender in line with the stereotyped objects at a rate significantly greater than chance (but not for neutral items). These results support the hypothesis that learning a language with a binary grammatical gender might be influenced by gender stereotypes.

This paper investigates the relationship between fingers and time representations in naturalistic Chinese Sign Language (CSL). Based on a CSL Corpus (Shanghai Variant, 2016–), we offer a thorough description of finger configurations for time expressions from 63 deaf signers, including three main types: digital, numeral incorporation, and points-to-fingers. The former two were further divided into vertical and horizontal fingers according to the orientation of fingertips. The results showed that there were interconnections between finger representations, numbers, ordering, and time in CSL. Vertical fingers were mainly used to quantify time units, whereas horizontal fingers were mostly used for sequencing or ordering events, and their forms could be influenced by Chinese number characters and the vertical writing direction. Furthermore, the use of points-to-fingers (e.g., pointing to the thumb, index, or little finger) formed temporal connectives in CSL and could be patterned to put a conversation in order. Additionally, CSL adopted similar linguistic forms in sequential time and adverbs of reason (e.g., cause and effect: events that happened earlier and events that happen later). Such a cause-and-effect relationship was a special type of temporal sequence. In conclusion, fingers are essential for time representation in CSL and their forms are biologically and culturally shaped.

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals can reveal the cost required to deal with information structure mismatches in speech or in text contexts. The present study investigates the costs related to the processing of different associations between the syntactic categories of Noun and Verb and the information categories of Topic and Focus. It is hypothesized that – due to the very nature (respectively, predicative and non-predicative) of verbal and nominal reference – sentences with Topics realized by verbs, and Focuses realized by nouns, should impose greater processing demands, compared to the decoding of nominal Topics and verbal Focuses. Data from event-related potential (ERP) measurements revealed an N400 effect in response to both nouns encoded as Focus and verbs packaged as Topic, confirming that the cost associated with information structure processing follows discourse-driven expectations also with respect to the word-class level.

Many studies have substantiated the perceptual symbol system, which assumes a routine generation of perceptual information during language comprehension, but little is known about the processing format in which the perceptual information of different dimensions is conveyed simultaneously during sentence comprehension. The current study provides the first experimental evidence of how multidimensional perceptual information (color and shape) was processed during online sentence comprehension in Mandarin. We designed three consecutive sentence–picture verification tasks that only differed in the delay of the display of pictures preceded by declarative sentences. The processing was analyzed in three stages based on time intervals (i.e., 0ms, +750ms, +1500ms). The response accuracy and response time data were reported. The initial stage (i.e., ISI=0ms) attested the match effect of color and shape, but the simulated representation of color and shape did not interact. In the intermediate stage (i.e., ISI=750ms), the routinely simulated color and shape interacted, but the match facilitation was found only in cases where one perceptual information was in mismatch while the other was not. In the final stage (i.e., ISI=1500ms), the match facilitation of one particular perceptual property was influenced by a mismatch with the other perceptual property. These results suggested that multiple perceptual information presented simultaneously was processed in an additive manner to a large extent before entering into the final stage, where the simulated perceptual information was integrated in a multiplicative manner. The results also suggested that color and shape were comparable to object recognition when conjointly conveyed. In relation to other evidence from behavioral and event-related potential studies on sentence reading in the discussion, we subscribed to the idea that the full semantic integration became available over time.

Much prior research has investigated how humans understand time using body-based contrasts like front/back and left/right. It has recently come to light, however, that some communities instead understand time using environment-based contrasts. Here, we present the richest portrait yet of one such case: the topographic system used by the Yupno of Papua New Guinea, in which the past is construed as downhill and the future as uphill. We first survey topographic concepts in Yupno language and culture, showing how they constitute a privileged resource for communicating about space. Next, we survey time concepts in Yupno, focusing on how topographic concepts are used to construe past, present, and future. We then illustrate how this topographic understanding of time comes to life in the words, hands, and minds of Yupno speakers. Drawing on informal interviews, we offer a view of the topographic system that goes beyond a community-level summary, and offers a glimpse of its individual-level and moment-to-moment texture. Finally, we step back to account for how this topographic understanding of time is embedded within a rich cognitive ecology of linguistic, cultural, gestural, and architectural practices. We close by discussing an elusive question: Why is the future uphill?