We present an account of semantic representation that focuses on distinct types of information from which word meanings can be learned. In particular, we argue that there are at least two major types of information from which we learn word meanings. The first is what we call experiential information. This is data derived both from our sensory-motor interactions with the outside world, as well as from our experience of own inner states, particularly our emotions. The second type of information is language-based. In particular, it is derived from the general linguistic context in which words appear. The paper spells out this proposal, summarizes research supporting this view and presents new predictions emerging from this framework.

The idea that concepts are embodied by our motor and sensory systems is popular in current theorizing about cognition. Embodied cognition accounts come in different versions and are often contrasted with a purely symbolic amodal view of cognition. Simulation, or the hypothesis that concepts simulate the sensory and motor experience of real world encounters with instances of those concepts, has been prominent in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Here, with a focus on spatial thought and language, I review some of the evidence cited in support of simulation versions of embodied cognition accounts. While these data are extremely interesting and many of the experiments are elegant, knowing how to best interpret the results is often far from clear. I point out that a quick acceptance of embodied accounts runs the danger of ignoring alternate hypotheses and not scrutinizing neuroscience data critically. I also review recent work from my lab that raises questions about the nature of sensory motor grounding in spatial thought and language. In my view, the question of whether or not cognition is grounded is more fruitfully replaced by questions about gradations in this grounding. A focus on disembodying cognition, or on graded grounding, opens the way to think about how humans abstract. Within neuroscience, I propose that three functional anatomic axes help frame questions about the graded nature of grounded cognition. First, are questions of laterality differences. Do association cortices in both hemispheres instantiate the same kind of sensory or motor information? Second, are questions about ventral dorsal axes. Do neuronal ensembles along this axis shift from conceptual representations of objects to the relationships between objects? Third, are questions about gradients centripetally from sensory and motor cortices towards and within perisylvian cortices. How does sensory and perceptual information become more language-like and then get transformed into language proper?

It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.

The issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts – for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate 425 abstract concepts on 15 dimensions: abstractness, concreteness, imageability, context availability, Body-Object-Interaction, Modality of Acquisition, Age of Acquisition, Perceptual modality strength, Metacognition, Social metacognition, Interoception, Emotionality, Social valence, Hand and Mouth activation. Results showed that conceiving concepts only in terms of concreteness/abstractness is too simplified. More abstract concepts are typically acquired later and through the linguistic modality and are characterized by high scores in social metacognition (feeling that others can help us in understanding word meaning), while concrete concepts obtain high scores in Body-Object-Interaction, imageability, and context availability. A cluster analysis indicated four kinds of abstract concepts: philosophical-spiritual (e.g., value), self-sociality (e.g., politeness), emotive/inner states (e.g., anger), and physical, spatio-temporal, and quantitative concepts (e.g., reflex). Overall, results support multiple representation views indicating that sensorimotor, inner, linguistic, and social experience have different weights in characterizing different kinds of abstract concepts.

According to recent work on lexical pragmatics within the relevance-theoretic framework, grasping the intended meaning of a metaphorically used word requires a process of adjusting the linguistically encoded concept to derive an ad hoc concept whose denotation is broader than that of the lexical concept. Metaphorical uses are claimed to be one kind of loose use of language, on a continuum with approximations, hyperboles and other kinds of meaning extension. The question addressed in this paper is whether this account fully captures the processes involved in understanding metaphors and the kinds of cognitive effects they have. We tackle this question by examining the similarities and differences between metaphors and hyperboles and between metaphors and similes. The upshot of our analyses is two proposals, both requiring further investigation: (a) that a distinction should be drawn between the kind of ad hoc concepts derived for hyperbolic and other loose uses, on the one hand, and metaphorical uses, on the other, and (b) that the understanding of some metaphorical uses, in particular extended and/or novel creative cases, is achieved by a different mode of processing altogether, one which gives much greater weight to the literal meaning.

In this theoretical paper we propose three different kinds of cognitive structure that have not been differentiated in the psychological and cognitive linguistic literatures. They are spatial primitives, image schemas, and schematic integrations. Spatial primitives are the first conceptual building blocks formed in infancy, image schemas are simple spatial stories built from them, and schematic integrations use the first two types to build concepts that include non-spatial elements, such as force and emotion. These different kinds of structure have all come under the umbrella term of ‘image schemas’. However, they differ in their content, developmental origin, imageability, and role in meaning construction in language and in thought. The present paper indicates how preverbal conceptualization needs to be taken into account for a complete understanding of image schemas and their uses. It provides examples to illustrate this influence, the most important of these being the primacy of imageable spatial information.

Recent years have seen rapid developments in automated text analysis methods focused on measuring psychological and demographic properties. While this development has mainly been driven by computer scientists and computational linguists, such methods can be of great value for social scientists in general, and for psychologists in particular. In this paper, we review some of the most popular approaches to automated text analysis from the perspective of social scientists, and give examples of their applications in different theoretical domains. After describing some of the pros and cons of these methods, we speculate about future methodological developments, and how they might change social sciences. We conclude that, despite the fact that current methods have many disadvantages and pitfalls compared to more traditional methods of data collection, the constant increase of computational power and the wide availability of textual data will inevitably make automated text analysis a common tool for psychologists.

Do infants learn their early words in semantic isolation? Or do they integrate new words into an inter-connected semantic system? In an infant-friendly adaptation of the adult lexical priming paradigm, infants at 18 and 24 months-of-age heard two words in quick succession. The noun-pairs were either related or unrelated. Following the onset of the target word, two pictures were presented, one of which depicted the target. Eye movements revealed that both age groups comprehended the target word. In addition, 24-month-olds demonstrated primed picture looking in two measures of comprehension: Named target pictures preceded by a related word pair took longer to disengage from and attracted more looking overall. The finding of enhanced target recognition demonstrates the emergence of semantic organisation by the end of the second year.

Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction overwhelmingly more probable, marginally more probable, or no more probable than another. Here, we present evidence that acoustic features of spontaneous speech reflect these probabilities: when speakers choose a less probable construction, they are more likely to be disfluent, and their fluent words are likely to have a relatively longer duration. Conversely, words in more probable constructions are shorter and spoken more fluently. Our findings suggest that the differing probabilities of a syntactic construction in context are not epiphenomenal, but reflect a part of a speakers' knowledge of their language.

Human language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central to everyday communication, our knowledge of the cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce the term ‘engagement’ to refer to grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs, and describe examples of engagement systems from around the world. Engagement systems express the speaker’s assumptions about the degree to which their attention or knowledge is shared (or not shared) by the addressee. Engagement categories can operate at the level of entities in the here-and-now (deixis), in the unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), and even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). In this first paper, we introduce engagement and situate it with respect to existing work on intersubjectivity in language. We then explore the key role of deixis in coordinating attention and expressing engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic systems from those that focus on the the location of the speaker, to those that encode the attentional state of the addressee.

On traditional accounts, word meanings are entries in a mental lexicon. Nonsense words lack such entries, and are therefore meaningless. Here, we show that under some circumstances nonsense words function indistinguishably from conventional words. The ‘nonsense’ words foove and crelch led participants to select systematically different clusters of adjectives and were reliably matched to different species of alien creatures (e.g., ‘crelches’ were pointy and narrow and ‘fooves’ were large and fat). In a categorization task in which participants learned to group two species of aliens primarily on the basis of roundness/pointiness, these novel labels facilitated performance as much as conventional words (e.g., round, pointy). The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism and support a non-traditional view of word meaning according to which words do not have meanings by virtue of a conventionalized form−meaning pairing. Rather, the ‘meaning’ of a word is the effect that the word form has on the user’s mental activity.

The property generation task (i.e. “feature listing”) is often assumed to measure concepts. Typically, researchers assume implicitly that the underlying representation of a concept consists of amodal propositions, and that verbal responses during property generation reveal their conceptual content. The experiments reported here suggest instead that verbal responses during property generation reflect two alternative sources of information: the linguistic form system and the situated simulation system. In two experiments, properties bearing a linguistic relation to the word for a concept were produced earlier than properties not bearing a linguistic relation, suggesting the early properties tend to originate in a word association process. Conversely, properties produced later tended to describe objects and situations, suggesting that late properties tend to originate from describing situated simulations. A companion neuroimaging experiment reported elsewhere confirms that early properties originate in language areas, whereas later properties originate in situated simulation areas. Together, these results, along with other results in the literature, indicate that property generation is a relatively complex process, drawing on at least two systems somewhat asynchronously.

It is well established that context plays a fundamental role in how we learn and use language. Here we explore how context links short-term language use with the long-term emergence of different types of language system. Using an iterated learning model of cultural transmission, the current study experimentally investigates the role of the communicative situation in which an utterance is produced (situational context) and how it influences the emergence of three types of linguistic systems: underspecified languages (where only some dimensions of meaning are encoded linguistically), holistic systems (lacking systematic structure), and systematic languages (consisting of compound signals encoding both category-level and individuating dimensions of meaning). To do this, we set up a discrimination task in a communication game and manipulated whether the feature dimension shape was relevant or not in discriminating between two referents. The experimental languages gradually evolved to encode information relevant to the task of achieving communicative success, given the situational context in which they are learned and used, resulting in the emergence of different linguistic systems. These results suggest language systems adapt to their contextual niche over iterated learning.

Dynamic conceptualization is a fundamental notion in cognitive linguistics. Abstract motion is one type of dynamic conceptualization. It is said to structure descriptions of static scenes such as ‘The mountain range goes from Mexico to Canada’, and in doing so, invokes a subjective sense of motion or state change. In recent years, a growing body of experimental research supports this claim. However, additional work is needed to understand the dynamics of abstract motion and the extent to which it generalizes. This paper provides some background on abstract motion and reports two new experiments that investigate two unexplored types of abstract motion, including visual paths and pattern paths. Together, the results indicate that abstract motion plays a central role in language use and understanding.

This article proposes that the representation of concepts in infancy is in the form of spatial image-schemas. A mechanism that simplifies spatial information is described along with a small set of spatial primitives that are sufficient to account for the conceptualizations that preverbal infants use to interpret objects and events. This early system is important to understand because it organizes the adult conceptual system of objects and events and remains its core. With development, the system becomes enriched by language in several ways, and also by means of analogical extension to non-spatial information. Nonspatial bodily information, such as feelings of force and motor activity, is also added, but remains secondary. It becomes associated with spatial representations, but except for its spatial aspects is represented in a more inchoate and less accessible fashion.

Empirical research has shown that the processing of words and sentences is accompanied by activation of the brain's motor system in language users. The degree of precision observed in this activation seems to be contingent upon (1) the meaning of a linguistic construction and (2) the depth with which readers process that construction. In addition, neurological evidence shows a correspondence between a disruption in the neural correlates of overt action and the disruption of semantic processing of language about action. These converging lines of evidence can be taken to support the hypotheses that motor processes (1) are recruited to understand language that focuses on actions and (2) contribute a unique element to conceptual representation. This article explores the role of this motor recruitment in language comprehension. It concludes that extant findings are consistent with the theorized existence of multimodal, embodied representations of the referents of words and the meaning carried by language. Further, an integrative conceptualization of “fault tolerant comprehension” is proposed.

Conceptual metaphor theory and other important theories in metaphor research are often experimentally tested by studying the effects of metaphorical frames on individuals’ reasoning. Metaphorical frames can be identified by at least two levels of analysis: words vs. concepts. Previous overviews of metaphorical-framing effects have mostly focused on metaphorical framing through words (metaphorical-words frames) rather than through concepts (metaphorical-concepts frames). This means that these overviews included only experimental studies that looked at variations in individual words instead of at the broader logic of messages. For this reason, we conducted a meta-analysis (k = 91, N = 34,783) to compare the persuasive impact of both types of metaphorical frames. Given that patterns of metaphor usage differ across discourse domains, and that effects may differ across modalities and discourse domains, we focused on one mode of presentation and one discourse domain only: verbal metaphorical framing in political discourse. Results showed that, compared to non-metaphorical frames, both metaphorical-words and metaphorical-concepts frames positively influenced beliefs and attitudes. Yet, these effects were larger for metaphorical-concepts frames. We therefore argue that future research should more explicitly describe and justify which level of analysis is chosen to examine the nature and effects of metaphorical framing.

While speculations on form–meaning resemblances in language go back millennia, the experimental study of iconicity is only about a century old. Here we take stock of experimental work on iconicity and present a double special issue with a diverse set of new contributions. We contextualise the work by introducing a typology of approaches to iconicity in language. Some approaches construe iconicity as a discrete property that is either present or absent; others treat it as involving semiotic relationships that come in kinds; and yet others see it as a gradient substance that comes in degrees. We show the benefits and limitations that come with each of these construals and stress the importance of developing accounts that can fluently switch between them. With operationalisations of iconicity that are well defined yet flexible enough to deal with differences in tasks, modalities, and levels of analysis, experimental research on iconicity is well equipped to contribute to a comprehensive science of language.

Variationist/evolutionary models of phonology assume a causal chain that links biases at the utterance level to the development and consolidation of abstract phonological patterns over time. Some of the properties of linguistic cognition that have been proposed to underlie this chain are (i) storage of experienced detail at multiple levels of description, (ii) feedback between perception and production, (iii) a similarity bias in the production and perception of variation, and (iv) enhancement of cues to potentially ambiguous lexical items in usage. I review evidence for these properties and argue that they interact to provide a pathway for individual usage events to influence the evolution of contrastive sublexcal category systems, i.e phoneme inventories. Specifically, the proposed Network-Feedback model predicts that the organization of sublexical category systems is shaped by a conflict between a general drive toward greater similarity among sublexical categories on the one hand, and a bias toward maintaining contrast between tokens of competing lexical categories on the other. The model provides testable hypotheses about the conditions favoring phoneme merger, chain-shifts, and phonemic splits, and more generally about the influence of lexical contrast on the packing of sublexical categories along gestural/perceptual dimensions. Finally, this pathway of change is consistent with proposals that sublexical categories such as features and segments are not primitives of language, but emerge through more general properties of performance, perception, categorization and learning.

In the usage-based approach to children’s language learning, language is seen as emerging from children’s preverbal communicative and cognitive skills. Children construct more abstract linguistic representations only gradually, and show uneven development in all aspects of their language learning. I will present results that show the relationship between children’s emerging linguistic structures and patterns in the speech addressed to them, and demonstrate the effects played by the consistency of markers, the complexity of the construction in question, and relative type and token frequencies within and across constructions. I highlight the contribution made by research that employs naturalistic, experimental, and modelling methodologies, and that is applied to a range of languages and to variability in the errors that children make. Finally, I will outline the outstanding issues for this approach, and how we might address them.