The article explores the prosodic and kinesic aspects of three different ish constructions using corpus data from the multimodal NewsScape Library of International Television News. The results reveal that bound -ish with ‘approximate’ meaning is longer in duration, higher in pitch, and shows more pitch variability than bound -ish with ‘properties’ meaning. Free Ish is also longer in duration and shows more pitch variability but is also prosodically set apart from its linguistic environment. Furthermore, the different ish constructions prove to be associated with different sets of kinesic features, although none of these reaches a significant level in the statistical model. It will be argued that the prosodic aspects mirror the constructional status of ish, whereas the kinesic aspects may be used to support their different functions.

This paper presents a usage-based method for investigating metaphor acquisition in the speech of children aged two and above. The method draws on the strengths of the established tools for metaphor identification such as Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), and Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam (MIP-VU), and adapts them for coding and analysing metaphors in the corpora of naturalistic interactions between children and their primary caregivers, such as those stored online in the CHILDES TalkBank. First, we discuss the premises underlying our methodological framework and provide a coding manual for working with child language. Second, we explain how to approach the challenges of coding transcripts of child speech and demonstrate how we reached high inter-annotator reliability scores of 0.97. We then show how the coding scheme works with a sample corpus of a child recorded between the ages of 2;0–3;1. To illustrate how the scheme can be applied to the study of metaphor acquisition, we analyse the coded metaphors for input–output frequencies. It is argued that our method can offer a unique lens for exploring metaphor production in very young children and it can help us to understand how children come to express their very first figurative meanings.

This paper examines how signers make lists. One way is to use the fingers on the signer’s nondominant hand to enumerate items on a list. The signer points to these list-fingers with the dominant hand. Previous analyses considered lists to be nondominant, one-handed signs, and thus were called list buoys because the nondominant hand often remains in place during the production of the list. The pointing hand was largely ignored as a nonlinguistic gesture. We take a constructional approach based on Cognitive Grammar. In our approach, we analyze lists as a type of pointing construction consisting of two meaningful components: a pointing device (the pointing hand) used to direct attention; and a Place, also consisting of form and a meaning. Using data from Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Finland–Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL), we examine the semantic role of each component, showing how the nondominant list-fingers identify and track discourse referents, and how the pointing hand is used to create higher-order entities by grouping list-fingers. We also examine the integration of list constructions and their components with other conventional constructions.

Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet, for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensory modalities combine more easily than others. Many adjectives that are used to describe taste, for instance, can also be used for smell, but, less likely, for sound. These associations between sensory modalities as they are expressed in language are the topic of this study. We looked at the distribution of the combinations of dominant modalities in pairs of antonymic sensory adjectives (e.g., sweet–sour), and how the dominant modality of the adjectives in these pairs differed from that of the adjectives in isolation. In our dataset, there was a sizeable number of pairs consisting of adjectives with differing dominant modalities. Within those pairs, we observed that adjectives with the dominant modality sight can also be used for touch and vice versa. Similarly, adjectives with the dominant modality of smell can also be used for taste and vice versa. Finally, adjectives with the dominant modalities sight and touch can both also be used for hearing and for taste, but not the other way around. These results contribute to our understanding of how language is used to describe sensory experiences, and, with that, how sensory experiences may be shaped by the words that we use to describe them.

Backchannels (BCs; listener signals such as ‘mmhm’ or ‘okay’) are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of BCs and to judge deviations from typical forms as negative. Very little is known about the use of BCs by speakers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In dialogue recordings of 28 German adults in two groups of disposition-matched dyads (i.e., both interlocutors were either autistic or non-autistic), we found that the ASD group was characterised by (1) a lower rate of BCs per minute (particularly in the early stages of conversation), (2) less diversity in the lexical realisation of BCs and (3) a less diverse and flexible mapping of different intonation contours to different BC types. We interpret these results as reflecting more general characteristics of autistic as compared to non-autistic individuals, namely different strategies in signalling attention towards an interlocutor and less flexible behaviour in social interaction.

The present study aimed at examining the perceptual span, the visual field area for information extraction within a single fixation, during the reading of traditional Chinese sentences. Native traditional Chinese readers’ eye-movements were recorded as they read sentences that were presented using a gaze-contingent technique, in which legible text was restricted within a window that moved in synchrony with the eyes, while characters outside the window were masked. Comparisons of the window conditions with a baseline condition in which no viewing constraint was applied showed that when the window revealed one previous character and three upcoming characters around the current fixation, reading speed and oculomotor activities reached peak performance. Compared to previous results with simplified Chinese reading, based on a similar set of materials, traditional Chinese exhibits a reduction of the perceptual span. We suggest that the visual complexity of a writing system likely influences the perceptual span during reading.

This study examines two seemingly similar quantifiers, a few and several, and argues that the differences between them go beyond the (slightly) different quantities they each denote. Specifically, we argue that several construes its nominal complement as composed of individuated entities, which renders them more prominent, and thus a stronger basis in support of a conclusion the speaker is arguing for. We base our analysis on two experiments and a corpus study. The experiments show that there is indeed an argumentative difference between the quantifiers, and the corpus study points to the discourse factors behind it. In comparison with a few, several is associated with a higher discourse prominence for its complement (greater individuation, significance) and with greater argumentative strength. Based on this data, we characterize the quantifiers’ prototypical discourse profiles. A typical instance of several occurs in persuasive genres, refers to a not-so-small quantity, construes the plural entity as composed of individuated entities, and contributes to a strong argument. A typical instance of a few occurs in non-persuasive genres, denotes a small quantity, construes the entities composing the plural entity as un-individuated, and contributes to a weak or neutral argument.

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.

Different speakers sometimes convey similar meanings differently. This study examined whether listeners could learn to associate a specific linguistic ‘style’ with a certain speaker, with no apparent difference in meaning, and the role of unnatural linguistic choices (or unexpectedness) in such learning. We created an inter-speaker variation in ‘style’ using the weak adjective ordering preferences in Hebrew. Participants were exposed to two different speakers, each producing a different adjective order, consistently. We manipulated the combinations of order pairings, based on their naturalness (with two natural orders, a natural and an unnatural order, and two unnatural orders), and examined participants’ ability to associate a unique order with a specific speaker. In two experiments, using different statistical analyses, we show that listeners can learn speaker-specific language use when it is irrelevant for meaning inferences, when deviance from natural or expected language use is involved. We further discuss whether learning may be facilitated by differences in naturalness or structural form. Our findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to inter-speaker variability in ‘style’, mostly when this ‘style’ is unexpected. This is in line with the predictions of Surprisal theory, and may suggest that surprisal plays a major role in learning speaker-specific language use.

Adults display cross-linguistic variability in their speech in how they package and order semantic elements of a motion event. These differences can also be found in speakers’ co-speech gestures (gesturing with speech), but not in their silent gestures (gesturing without speech). Here, we examine when in development children show the differences between co-speech gesture and silent gesture found in adults. We studied speech and gestures produced by 100 children learning English or Turkish (n = 50/language) – equally divided into 5 age-groups: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, and 11–12 years. Children were asked to describe three-dimensional spatial event scenes (e.g., a figure crawling across carpet) first with speech and then without speech using their hands. We focused on physical motion events that elicit, in adults, cross-linguistic differences in co-speech gesture and cross-linguistic similarities in silent gesture. We found the adult pattern even in the youngest children: (1) Language shaped co-speech gesture beginning at age 3 years, showing an early effect of language on thinking for speaking (as measured by gestures that occur during the speech act). (2) Language did not affect silent gesture at any age, highlighting early limits on the effects language has on thinking and revealing a language of gesture that shows similarities across languages.

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.