In this study, our objective was to explore the impact of hearing loss on the conceptual system underlying word meaning. We collected perceptual strength norms for 200 Italian words from early deaf individuals with limited or no access to auditory information and compared them to existing norms from hearing individuals. For each word, participants provided perceptual strength ratings for each perceptual modality. Our results revealed a significant reduction of the auditory modality in the norms provided by deaf individuals compared to the hearing population. However, we did not observe an overall decrease in reported perceptual strength. Interestingly, we found a heightened involvement of other sensory modalities accompanied by reduced modality exclusivity in the conceptualization of words, indicating that deaf individuals heavily rely on information coming from the other perceptual modalities to form concepts. These findings suggest that hearing loss leads to a reorganisation of word conceptualization, characterised by increased multisensoriality. Importantly, although diminished, the auditory modality remains present, suggesting that deaf individuals can still infer auditory-associated knowledge about words to some extent.

Two mouse cursor tracking experiments investigated lexical prediction. Participants heard predictive sentences (e.g., “What the librarian will read, which is shown here, is the…”) and viewed visual arrays with predictable targets (e.g., book) and phonological competitors (e.g., bull) or unrelated distractors (e.g., goat). Participants tasked with clicking on the (i.e., target) object referred to in sentences (Experiment 1), or with doing so interleaved with a cloze procedure (e.g., completing “What the librarian will read is this.”; Experiment 2), made predictive mouse cursor movements to targets. However, predictive attraction to phonological competitors was not observed. Implications for theories of predictive sentence processing are discussed.

Prosody and gesture are two known cues for expressing information structure by emphasising new or important elements in spoken discourse while attenuating given information. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning mapping to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. This study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to differentiate levels of givenness.

Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 native French speakers were video-recorded during a short spontaneous narrative task. Participants’ oral productions were annotated for information status, perceived prominence, pitch accents, and head gesture types. Results show that given information in French is multimodally less marked than new-er information and is accordingly perceived as less prominent. Our findings indicate that Catalan learners of French mark given information more frequently than native speakers and may transfer their use of low pitch accents to their second language (L2). The data also show that the use of head gestures depends on the presence of prosodic marking, calling into question the assumption that prosody and gesture have balanced functional roles. Finally, the type of head gesture does not appear to play a significant role in marking information status.

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.

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.

Prosody includes the pitch, timing and loudness in speech, which can convey meaning and emotion. This study examines whether prosodic categories affect novel noun learning and whether the referent characteristic influence learning. Previous research showed that emotional prosody interfered with adults’ noun learning (West et al., 2017), but it had no effect on children (West et al., 2022). However, these researchers varied their method across ages, including animacy and complexity of the referent, and it is unclear if the results extend beyond the three emotional prosodies tested. Participants in the current set of studies heard novel words presented in five prosodic categories (within-subject) in order to learn the label for either animate or inanimate objects (between-subject). Study 1 compared inanimate objects and aliens, with better noun learning performance for inanimate objects. Study 2 compared inanimate objects with the same objects with faces added, but there was no difference in noun learning by object type. Both studies showed differences in noun learning by the prosodic category, with warning less accurate than naming. These results demonstrate how extralinguistic factors like prosody, attention and referent complexity influence noun learning.

Embodied imagery hypothesis proposes the activation of perceptual-motor systems during language processing. Previous studies primarily used concrete visual stimuli to investigate mental imagery in language processing by native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners, but few studies employed schematic diagrams. The study aims to investigate mental imagery in processing prepositional phrases by English NSs and L2 learners. Using image-schematic diagrams as primes, we examine whether any mental imagery effect is modulated by target preposition (over, in), the abstractness of meaning (spatial, extended), and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 1,040 ms, 2,040 ms). A total of 79 adult L2 learners and 100 NSs of English completed diagram–picture matching and semantic priming phrasal decision tasks. Results revealed interference effects on L2 processing of over phrases and under 2,040 ms SOA, but no such effects were observed in the NS group. The selective interference effects in L2 suggest different mental imagery patterns between L1 and L2 processing, and processing schematic diagram primes requires high cognitive demands, potentially leading to difficulties in integrating visual and linguistic information and making grammaticality judgments. The findings partially validate schematic diagrams as visual representations of concepts and suggest the need for further examination of schematic diagrams with varying degrees of complexity.

This article sheds light on the significant yet nuanced roles of shame and guilt in influencing moral behaviour, a phenomenon that became particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic with the community’s heightened desire to be seen as moral. These emotions are central to human interactions, and the question of how they are conveyed linguistically is a vast and important one. Our study contributes to this area by analysing the discourses around shame and guilt in English and Japanese online forums, focusing on the terms shame, guilt, haji (‘shame’) and zaiakukan (‘guilt’). We utilise a mix of corpus-based methods and natural language processing tools, including word embeddings, to examine the contexts of these emotion terms and identify semantically similar expressions. Our findings indicate both overlaps and distinct differences in the semantic landscapes of shame and guilt within and across the two languages, highlighting nuanced ways in which these emotions are expressed and distinguished. This investigation provides insights into the complex dynamics between emotion words and the internal states they denote, suggesting avenues for further research in this linguistically rich area.

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.

This paper offers an experimental approach to the polysemy of the Estonian perception verb tundma ‘to feel’ from the perspective of the perception ➔ cognition metaphor. First, a sorting task is used to map how native speakers perceive the different senses of tundma ‘to feel’. The results show that cognition-related senses of tundma form the most distinct and coherent group. This set was researched further by means of a second experiment, a conceptual feature rating task. The aim of this task was to assess if the cognition-related meanings of tundma differ from other cognition verbs of Estonian (teadma ‘to know’, aru saama ‘to understand’) in that they are metaphorically linked to physical perception. It was predicted that native speakers use characteristics tied to the physical perception in the conceptualisation of the type of knowledge expressed by tundma. However, native speakers did not rate sentences with tundma as more physical than sentences with abstract cognition verbs. This result is indicative of the nature of the semantics of tundma being more varied than was first thought. It is argued that the semantics of tundma refer to it being a verb of general proximal perception.

This study aims to determine if there are differences in color–emotion association between monolingual speakers of Spanish and Mandarin, depending on how colors are presented (verbally or visually). We tested two groups of 25 speakers of these two languages in two different tasks using the Geneva Emotion Wheel, which encompasses 20 types of emotions. In Task 1, 13 colors were presented to participants as color terms in their native language, whereas in Task 2 the same colors were presented as color patches from the Munsell chart. Participants were then asked to associate color terms or color patches to the set of emotion concepts (and intensities of emotion) in the Geneva Emotion Wheel. Overall, differences between languages were not significant, regarding either the type of emotion or individual dimensions of emotion (valence, arousal or power), although significant differences were observed for specific colors. Also, Spanish speakers tended to attribute higher intensity values and higher numbers of emotion values to colors. At the same time, speakers of both languages reacted similarly to color presentation, with color terms being associated with the same emotions as color patches, but eliciting stronger reactions with respect to intensity and the number of emotion values. Finally, we found less variability in color–emotion associations within the Spanish-speaking group. Overall, our study points to a mixed pattern of universality and culture-specificity regarding how colors are used for conveying emotions by people.

Social hierarchical information impacts language comprehension. Nevertheless, the specific process underlying the integration of linguistic and extralinguistic sources of social hierarchical information has not been identified. For example, the Chinese social hierarchical verb 赡养, /shan4yang3/, ‘support: provide for the needs and comfort of one’s elders’, only allows its Agent to have a lower social status than the Patient. Using eye-tracking, we examined the precise time course of the integration of these semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs and extralinguistic social hierarchical information during natural reading. A 2 (Verb Type: hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical) × 2 (Social Hierarchy Sequence: match vs. mismatch) design was constructed to investigate the effect of the interaction on early and late eye-tracking measures. Thirty-two participants (15 males; age range: 18–24 years) read sentences and judged the plausibility of each sentence. The results showed that violations of semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs induced shorter first fixation duration but longer regression path duration and longer total reading time on sentence-final nouns (NP2). These differences were absent under non-hierarchical conditions. The results suggest that a mismatch between linguistic and extralinguistic social hierarchical information is immediately detected and processed.

The aim of this paper is to develop a Cognitive Grammar-based analysis of English Copy-raising (CR) constructions such as Richard seems like he is dancing. We argue that the notion of reference-point plays a crucial role in licensing the matrix-subject of the construction. In CR, with the epistemic verbs seem and appear, the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the pronominal copy (if a copy exists) in the embedded clause. The aboutness topicality of the matrix-subject in CR is expected, owing to its reference-point property. The epistemic CR construction is acceptable without a pronominal copy if the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the complement clause. The same type of analysis is applied to the CR construction with perceptual resemblance (PR) verbs – sound, look, feel, and smell – leading to the conclusion that the strong dichotomy between epistemic and PR verbs is illusory. It is further demonstrated that expletive there-raising in CR is motivated by the same reference-point phenomenon. The difference between there-raising and other CR examples stems from the role of there as a setting subject. Our reference-point-based analysis predicts a metonymic interpretation of the matrix-subject, which we attribute to the connection between reference-point and metonymy.

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation. Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.

Extensive evidence has demonstrated that bilinguals non-selectively activate lexicons of both languages when reading or hearing words in one language. Here, we further investigated the electrophysiological roles of cross-linguistic orthography and phonology in the processing of L2 spoken words in unbalanced Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in a cross-modal situation. Relative to unrelated control, the recognition of auditory L2 words showed behavioral interference effects when paired with orthographic or phonological neighbors of the correct translations of L2 words. Moreover, the lexical effects were also exhibited in the electrophysiological data, as reflected by marginally less positive late positive component (500–800 ms) amplitudes in the frontal region. Importantly, the orthographic rather than phonological translation neighbor condition elicited less negative N400 (300–500 ms) amplitudes in the parietal–occipital regions, suggesting that this orthographic translation neighbor condition facilitated the co-activation of spoken L2 words. Taken together, these findings indicate that cross-linguistic orthographic and phonological activation have different temporal dynamics with both bottom-up parallel cross-linguistic activation and the top-down inhibitory control mechanism governing the two-language lexical organization in L2 spoken word recognition.

Speech-accompanying gestures have been shown to reduce cognitive load on a secondary task compared to speaking without gestures. In the current study, we investigate whether this benefit of speech-accompanying gestures is shared by speech-accompanying actions (i.e., movements that leave a lasting trace in the physical world). In two experiments, participants attempted to retain verbal and spatial information from a grid while describing a pattern while gesturing, while making the pattern, or while keeping hands still. Producing gestures reduced verbal load compared to keeping hands still when the pattern being described was visually present (Experiment 1), and this benefit was not shared by making the pattern. However, when the pattern being described was not visually present (Experiment 2), making the pattern benefited verbal load compared to keeping hands still. Neither experiment revealed a significant difference between gesture and action. Taken together, the findings suggest that moving the hands in meaningful ways can benefit verbal load.

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) holds that most conceptual metaphors are processed unconsciously. However, whether multiple words can be integrated into a holistic metaphoric sentence without consciousness remains controversial in cognitive science and psychology. This study aims to investigate the role of consciousness in processing Chinese nominal metaphoric sentences ‘A是B’ (A is[like] B) with a psychophysical experimental paradigm referred to as breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). We manipulated sentence types (metaphoric, literal and anomalous) and word forms (upright, inverted) in a two-staged experiment (CFS and non-CFS). No difference was found in the breakthrough times among all three types of sentences in the CFS stage, while literal sentences were detected more slowly than either metaphoric or anomalous sentences in the non-CFS stage. The results suggest that the integration of multiple words may not succeed without the participation of consciousness, let alone metaphoric processing. These findings may redefine ‘unconscious’ in CMT as ‘preconscious’ and support the indirect access view regarding how the metaphoric meaning is processed in the brain.

This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted two experiments using a similarity judgement paradigm while manipulating the presence of neuter gender stimuli (Phillips & Boroditsky, 2003). Experiment 1, including neuter gender, revealed no significant effects, compatible with earlier studies on three-gendered languages. Conversely, Experiment 2, excluding neuter gender stimuli, showed significant language effects. Bilingual participants rated pairs as more similar when grammatical genders in both languages were congruent with the biological sex of a character. Significant effects were also found for pairs with mismatching grammatical genders in Ukrainian and Russian. Participants with higher proficiency in Ukrainian rated pairs as more similar when the grammatical gender of a noun in Ukrainian was congruent with the character’s biological sex, and incongruent in Russian. Our findings thus provide the first empirical demonstration that the exclusion of neuter gender online induces grammatical gender effects in speakers of three-gendered languages.