Word-object and action-object learning in children aged 30 to 48 months appears to develop at a similar time scale and adheres to similar attentional constraints. However, children below 36 months show different patterns of learning word-object and action-object associations when this information is presented in a bimodal context (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b). Here, we investigated 12- and 24-month-olds’ word-object and action-object learning when this information is presented in a unimodal context. Forty 12- and 24-month-olds were presented with two novel objects that were either first associated with a novel label (word learning task) and then later with a novel action (action learning task) or vice versa. In subsequent yoked test phases, children either heard one of the novel labels or saw a hand performing one of the actions presented with the two objects on screen while we measured their target looking. Generalized linear mixed models indicate that 12-month-olds learned action-object associations but not word-object associations and 24-month-olds learned neither word- nor action-object associations. These results extend previous findings (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b) and, together, suggest that children appear to learn action-object associations early in development while struggling with learning word-object associations in certain contexts until 2 years of age.

While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time.

Monomorphemic words have been found to influence category formation, as they encode one general category and thus activate it more than other related categories in the same lexical network. On the other hand, multimorphemic words can encode multiple categories from the same network by the multiple forms they combine. Superordinate categories are encoded by sub-lexical forms (e.g., affixes), while the entire words encode lower categories in the hierarchical structure. In the present study, we asked whether sub-lexical forms influence the learning of the meaning encoded by the entire word they underlie. We used Semitic-like words where sub-lexical forms (syllabic patterns) encode superordinate categories of manner-of-motion, and the entire words encode lower-level categories (moving characters). In our main experiment, a word-learning test showed that a shared syllabic pattern had a negative effect on the learning of the moving characters encoded by the entire word. This effect was revealed mainly in dimensions related to the superordinate category encoded by the pattern. The effect and its direction are beyond the expectations of enhanced category representations suggested in previous literature. We conclude that the effect of word-form is beyond the specific category they encode and can have different directions at different hierarchical levels.

How people communicate about motion events and how this is shaped by language typology are mostly studied with a focus on linguistic encoding in speech. Yet, human communication typically involves an interactional exchange of multimodal signals, such as hand gestures that have different affordances for representing event components. Here, we review recent empirical evidence on multimodal encoding of motion in speech and gesture to gain a deeper understanding of whether and how language typology shapes linguistic expressions in different modalities, and how this changes across different sensory modalities of input and interacts with other aspects of cognition. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that Talmy’s typology of event integration predicts multimodal event descriptions in speech and gesture and visual attention to event components prior to producing these descriptions. Furthermore, variability within the event itself, such as type and modality of stimuli, may override the influence of language typology, especially for expression of manner.

Empirical studies on bilingual children’s reference production have often focussed on comparisons with monolingual peers. In this study, we introduce the concept of ‘reference profiles’: Speakers may exhibit similar or different behaviours in reference production, independently of whether they belong to a specific group (e.g., monolinguals or bilinguals) or whether their production adheres to some norm. Thirty-seven Greek–Italian bilingual children (Mage = 9;4, range 7;10–11;6) performed narrative retelling tasks in both of their languages, as well as vocabulary tasks and various cognitive tasks. The results show that the children had a good mastery of reference (i.e., appropriately using null pronouns, full pronouns or full nouns) in both of their languages. Using cluster analyses, we identified two distinct reference profiles. Further investigation showed that these profiles differed in both their sustained attention and in the use of overspecified referring expressions in contexts where reference to the same referent was maintained. These results are interpreted in light of current cognitive theories of (bilingual) reference processing and emphasise the potential of reference profiles for the study of other domains beyond bilingual reference production.

Government attention selectively distributed to various issues in policy-making processes is usually reflected in language, such as metaphors in political discourse. In addition, metaphor change may reveal how conceptualizations of major topics such as economy and ecology evolve over time. After self-building a corpus of China’s 45-year Government Work Reports, this study explores whether there is a difference in attention to topics of economy and ecology over time and investigates the diachronic change of metaphor use on them based on a modified framework for diachronic metaphor change analysis. Results show that attention to economy has been steadily decreasing while attention to ecology has been growing, and that there is an increasing tendency of using more economy and ecology metaphors. Metaphor change on the use of source domains is arranged on a continuum, ranging from constant use (war for economy and ecology, and journey and object for economy), incremental change (living organism and building for economy and ecology, and object for ecology) to fundamental change (building and living organism for ecology). This study may enrich the understanding of diachronic metaphor change by providing a Chinese perspective on the metaphor use in government discourse over time.

Three quasi-experimental studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between the evaluative (i.e., agree/true) and the meta-cognitive (i.e., understand) response, and to determine which type of response people are more likely to provide when responding to one-sentence assertive statements. In Studies 1 and 2, participants performed two separate tasks in which they were asked to indicate the levels of: (i) understanding and (ii) agreement / perceived truthfulness of 126 one-sentence statements. The results indicated that participants were likely to provide a negative evaluative response (i.e., disagree/false) to a statement that they did not understand. In Study 3, participants were asked to evaluate the same 126 statements and choose between four response options: agree, disagree, understand, do not understand. The results indicated that people are more likely provide an evaluative response regardless of the understandability of a statement. The results of these studies are discussed in relation to (i) pragmatic perspective of how people infer speakers’ meaning, and (ii) cognitive processes underlying evaluative and meta-cognitive response.

The Russian prefix pod- has several meanings, both concrete ones having to do with approaching or being under or down, and a series of seemingly unrelated abstract meanings such as imitating, ingratiating, or doing in secret. This paper approaches the polysemy of pod- from the viewpoint of the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Conceptual Models (LCCM) that sees word meaning not as a permanent property of words, but as a dynamic process in which context and accessed non-linguistic knowledge representation play an important role. This approach uses the notion of lexical concepts to describe the mediating unit between concrete linguistic examples and cognitive models that these examples are connected to. The 505 verbs analyzed bring up the lexical concepts [UNDER], [VERTICAL MOVEMENT], [CLOSE], and [CONTACT]. The connection of these lexical concepts with certain metaphorical and metonymical models is also discussed. Twelve of the 505 verbs are examined more closely in different contexts with the help of twenty-nine illustrative examples from the spoken corpus of the Russian National Corpus.

Y-adjectives are English adjectives that end in an orthographic <y> and a /i/ sound, for example lazy. Deriving its hypotheses from previous corpus findings and construction-based principles to language study, the experiment here reported validates the benefit a comparative alternation account of y-adjectives will accrue from a consideration of more and -er constructions across disyllabic adjectives that are not y-ones (called the HANDSOME adjectives). Reading times related to the comparative constructions of morphologically complex and simple y-adjectives were collected before and after native speaker exposure to one of three treatments – a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME more constructions, a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME-er constructions, or a control condition. Processing of y-adjective more constructions was found eased with exposure to HANDSOME more constructions. This exposure moreover overrode an anticipated processing ease for simple y-adjective -er constructions, while an exposure to HANDSOME -er constructions overrode an anticipated processing ease for complex y-adjective more constructions. The findings support the value of a constructional approach to understanding y-adjective comparatives.

Readers actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specific linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007; Madden & Zwaan, 2003). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and how it is connected to other dimensions of model construction. In three experiments, participants were asked to complete sentences with a choice of grammatical aspect form (perfective or imperfective). The test sentences systematically varied four dimensions of the sentence that were linked to grammatical aspect in different ways: telicity and transitivity (both linked through their semantic representations), subject animacy (linked through an inference over semantic representations), and related location information (linked through an inference grounded in world knowledge). In addition, to examine the influence of discourse function (backgrounding vs. foregrounding) on aspectual choice different construction types were varied across experiments – specifically a fronted locative construction and the presence of a generic narrative opener (Once upon a time). The results found that aspectual choice depends on information linked to the semantic representation of grammatical aspect; however, in contrast to previous work (e.g., Ferreti et al., 2007) information grounded in world knowledge (location information) did not influence aspectual choice except when it was integrated in a specialized discourse construction.

The present study aimed to investigate whether contextual factors influence how a reference is processed in discourse. We used intact and violated presuppositions (PSP), triggered by a definite or indefinite noun phrase, to monitor the reference process. In one sentence set, a contextual referent was explicitly mentioned close or far from the PSP-triggering noun phrase (memory context). In another sentence set, a referent was not explicitly mentioned in the context, but an inference to a referent was either plausible or implausible due to contextual semantic relations (inference context). Participants were asked to rate the coherence of the discourse after listening to it. Our results revealed a strong influence of the temporal distance of the contextual presentation of a referent. When the referent was far in the context (memory context), PSP violations were judged to be less severe than for close referents, suggesting that they are less clearly represented in memory. Furthermore, PSP violations seemed to play a subordinate role when the semantic context provided a basis for the plausible presence of a referent (inference context). Our results suggest that discourse comprehension involves referential processes whose importance may fade with distance in memory or may be obscured by semantic contextual content.

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.

This paper offers an account of within- and between-language differences in the grammatical encoding of directive meaning as represented in yoga discourse in two cognate languages: Polish and Russian. Specifically, the focus is put on three constructions: the imperative and the imperfective non-past indicative in both languages, and the indicative past, which is utilised only in Russian. In the analysis, we make an eclectic selection of methodological tools, drawing on a few models of illocution which have been put forward within Cognitive Linguistics. As is shown, even if yoga instructions are generally assessed as relatively weak directives, there are fine-grained differences in some aspects of construal evoked by the examined constructions resulting in differences in the force impact among the respective patterns and in their distribution. In the analysis, we consider such aspects of construal as: (i) the actuality or virtuality of the event presented in the utterance; (ii) the presence or absence of the speaker in the onstage region; and (iii) the aspectual opposition between an ongoing or completed event. The analysis, which is both qualitative and quantitative, has been based on a corpus of 300 randomly selected instructions in each language (600 in total).

One typical use of negation is to refer to exceptions. In a visual display showing several similar items (majority) and one exception, referring to the exception by negating the majority should therefore be pragmatically felicitous. We investigated whether comprehenders are sensitive to these pragmatic aspects when processing negative sentences and having to identify the according items in the visual display. In Experiment 1, participants read affirmative and negative sentences referring to either the exception or the majority object in strongly biased displays. Additionally, unbiased displays were implemented, showing equal numbers of objects of each type. Identification times of the correct referent were shorter with the biased display independent of sentence polarity. Also, picking the exceptional item in the biased display was faster than picking a majority item, independent of sentence polarity. Thus, participants did not specifically profit from pragmatically felicitous conditions when processing negation. Critically, in the biased displays, the exceptional object was highly salient, which might have initially drawn the participant’s attention to this object, resulting in a general speed-up. Therefore, in Experiment 2, we used a biased display with reduced saliency of the exceptional object. Again negation did not result in a specific speed-up due to pragmatically correct negation use. Thus, negation does not seem to facilitate the identification of an exceptional object.

Movement scientists have proposed to ground the relation between prosody and gesture in ‘vocal-entangled gestures’, defined as biomechanical linkages between upper limb movement and the respiratory–vocal system. Focusing on spoken language negation, this article identifies an acoustic profile with which gesture is plausibly entangled, specifically linking the articulatory behaviour of onset consonant lengthening with forelimb gesture preparation and facial deformation. This phenomenon was discovered in a video corpus of accented negative utterances from English-language televised dialogues. Eight target examples were selected and examined using visualization software to analyse the correspondence of gesture phase structures (preparation, stroke, holds) with the negation word’s acoustic signal (duration, pitch and intensity). The results show that as syllable–onset consonant lengthens (voiced alveolar /n/ = 300 ms on average) with pitch and intensity increasing (e.g. ‘NNNNNNEVER’), the speaker’s humerus is rotating with palm pronating/adducing while his or her face is distorting. Different facial distortions, furthermore, were found to be entangled with different post-onset phonetic profiles (e.g. vowel rounding). These findings illustrate whole-bodily dynamics and multiscalarity as key theoretical proposals within ecological and enactive approaches to language. Bringing multimodal and entangled treatments of utterances into conversation has important implications for gesture studies.

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.

Failing to communicate a message in everyday settings can be a frustrating experience. However, miscommunication can lead to disaster in high-stakes situations. Yet in these contexts, under pressure to perform efficiently, speakers may also find themselves with limited resources to devote to message clarity. To understand how cognitive constraint affects communication and explore a possible low-cost solution, we investigated a method for moderating ambiguity production in the face of competing attentional demands: taking the perspective of the listener. Over two experiments, speakers labeled images (Experiment 1) or provided instructions (Experiment 2) to listeners in a non-interactive communication task. In both experiments, speakers were randomly assigned to cognitive constraint and perspective-taking conditions, such that some speakers were under higher cognitive constraint and some speakers received a simple perspective-taking directive. We replicated previous findings that additional cognitive constraint impairs speakers’ ability to avoid ambiguity. Additionally, we found that a simple directive can promote speaker clarity when labeling images, but not when providing instructions. These results suggest that a simple directive is likely insufficient to ensure speaker clarity in all cases.

In masked priming lexical decision tasks in alphabetic or syllabic script languages, latencies are longer when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue–BLUR) than when primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care–BLUR) – an “inhibitory neighbor priming effect.” In contrast, Zhou et al. (1999) demonstrated facilitatory orthographic neighbor priming for two-character Chinese words (e.g., 华丽–华贵). However, Zhou et al. did not control for relative prime-target frequency, which has been shown to be important in experiments when examining languages with other scripts. In the present Experiment 1 word neighbor primes (e.g., 容易-容貌) produced an inhibitory neighbor priming effect when the prime was higher frequency than the target, paralleling effects in other script languages. In further experiments, paralleling those in other script languages, two-character targets primed by nonword neighbors (容待-容貌) or single constituent characters matching the target in either position (容-容貌) showed significant facilitation. These results suggest that lexical activation/competition processes for two-character Chinese words are reasonably similar to those for words in alphabetic/syllabic script languages.