Research on figurative meaning in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would benefit from considering a greater variety of data types and using more diverse methods. Previous studies have predominantly applied experimental methods to investigate processing of figurative language (mostly metaphor) and have for the most part concluded that individuals with ASD have deficits in figurative language comprehension. In this study, we focus on the creation and communication of figurative meaning in discursively situated and thematically organized verbal, gestural, and pictorial data published by an autistic artist in the form of videos and comics. Across three prominent experiential themes in the data, we isolate types of conceptualizations and generalize over mappings between target and source experiences. We find that the data are rich in figurative meaning expression (e.g., metaphor and metonymy) conveyed through language, co-speech gestures, and pictures in ways that are clearly embodied (experientially based) and that reflect affordances and constraints of these modes of communication. While our case study of meaning production does not contradict previous research on figurative meaning comprehension in populations, it does indicate benefits of taking a broader and multimodal approach to figurative meaning in research on ASD.

Few studies have explored in depth the mechanisms that underlie the execution of the property generation task, in spite of its importance and wide usage. The main exception to this is Santos, Chaigneau, Simmons, and Barsalou’s (2011) research: they claim that the two mechanisms at issue are word association and situated simulation. On the basis of the Linguistic and Situated Simulation theory, these researchers assert that word association is executed by a linguistic system, whilst situated simulation is executed by a situated simulation system. From these claims, the authors derive a series of predictions concerning the types of features that would be produced in the property generation task, and the order in which those types of features would appear. Our aim was to test those predictions, using an existent property generation database in Spanish. Our results are partially in accordance with Santos et al.’s results. The main divergence is related to the behavior of taxonomic superordinate features. We examine alternative explanations to account for this discrepancy. Furthermore, we criticize Santos et al.’s conception about what counts as a linguistic feature, and analyze alternative models about this issue.

Demonstratives (this/that in English) are pivotal in communication. In this study, we show that semantic features of referents systematically influence speakers’ choices of demonstrative forms for Spanish nouns in the absence of a guiding context. We used the Demonstrative Choice Task (DCT), previously applied to two-term demonstrative languages (Danish, English, and Italian), and applied it to Spanish, a three-term demonstrative system (este/ese/aquel), to test if the semantic dimensions driving demonstrative choice overlap with those found for English. 1,639 native Spanish speakers were presented with 480 nouns rated along 76 semantic features and were asked to match each noun with a demonstrative. We found that demonstratives are influenced by the same semantic factors as two-term languages, such as manipulability, valence, and the self. In Spanish, these semantic factors predict the demonstrative choice between the proximal este/a and a combination of medial and distal forms ese/a and aquel/la. Additional semantic factors affect speakers’ preferences for ese/a versus aquel/a (e.g., visuality and time). We conclude that many of the semantic attractors influencing the choice of demonstratives are constant across languages, independent of the number of terms characterizing the demonstrative system, and provide a window into the landscape of meaning subserving linguistic reference.

Two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, when naar was used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent than when richting was used. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used this linguistic pair to test the effect of two factors (i.e., the actor’s goal and the interlocutor’s status) on endpoint conceptualization via language production tasks. We found significant effects of both factors. First, participants chose naar more often when there was an inference in the referential situation that the reference object was the actor’s goal than when there was no such inference. Second, participants chose richting more often when they were told to describe the referential scenario to a police officer than to a friend. Participants were more cautious with their statements and were less willing to commit themselves to stating the goal of the agent when talking to a police officer than to a friend. The results are discussed in relation to relevant linguistic theories and event theories.

Meanings communicated with depictions constitute an integral part of how speakers and signers actually use language (Clark, 2016). Recent studies have argued that, in sign languages, depicting strategy like constructed action (CA), in which a signer enacts the referent, is used for referential purposes in narratives. Here, we tested the referential function of CA in a more controlled experimental setting and outside narrative context. Given the iconic properties of CA we hypothesized that this strategy could be used for efficient information transmission. Thus, we asked if use of CA increased with the increase in the information required to be communicated. Twenty-three deaf signers of LIS described unconnected images, which varied in the amount of information represented, to another player in a director–matcher game. Results revealed that participants used CA to communicate core information about the images and also increased the use of CA as images became informatively denser. The findings show that iconic features of CA can be used for referential function in addition to its depictive function outside narrative context and to achieve communicative efficiency.

This study evaluates the relative effects of two cognitive linguistic approaches – using animated versus static scenes in an illustration based on the spatial concept-oriented metaphor – and a non-cognitive linguistic approach on the Japanese EFL learners’ processing of request strategies with degrees of politeness. The cognitive linguistic approach consisted of applying the metaphor politeness is distance in the teaching of different degrees of politeness. It involved a spatial concept projection through which participants could understand degrees of politeness in terms of the spatially visualized concepts of near–far and high–low relationships associated with three social variables – closeness, power, and speaker difficulty – in either animated or static illustration. In contrast, the non-cognitive linguistic approach involved rote learning of target English polite requests in a list. The results demonstrated that the static version of the cognitive linguistic approach enabled participants to process degrees of politeness and perform as well as those who underwent the animated version. Moreover, the animation effects did not appear to have had a major impact on the overall performance of groups subjected to both cognitive language approaches. The results also showed that the cognitive linguistic approach groups outperformed the non-cognitive linguistic approach and control groups.

Literacy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children’s AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials.

Speakers of the world’s languages differ in the ways they talk about directed motion. Speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-languages; e.g., English) typically conflate Path and Manner in a single clause (e.g., run out), whereas speakers of verb-framed languages (V-languages; e.g., Spanish) tend to convey Path and Manner in two different clauses (e.g., salir corriendo ‘exit running’). Herein, we ask whether speakers also show systematic variability within particular languages and language types in their directed motion descriptions. We examine this question by comparing oral narratives of adult native speakers of one V-language (Spanish) and two S-languages (German, Polish) (N = 15), where each subject provided a simultaneous description of an ongoing animated video depicting self- (e.g., jump into the river) and caused-motion (e.g., throw a stone into the river) events. Our results showed strong evidence for both intra-typological and language-internal variability, especially in the extent to which the Manner component is encoded. Overall, the locus of Path encoding (e.g., verb, prefix, particle) and the conceptual structure of motion events (i.e., self-motion, caused-motion) were two key factors that influenced the speakers’ choice of lexicalization pattern. We discuss the implications of our findings, which (i) suggest a more nuanced typology of motion events that expands the binary distinction between V- vs. S-languages – in line with earlier work on intra-typological variability, and (ii) highlight the relevance of such a nuanced typology for motion cognition.

We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *You giggled me). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation errors from children (aged 5–6) to investigate whether the same constraints operate in production. For judgments, the data showed effects of preemption, entrenchment, and semantics for all ages. For production, only an effect of preemption was observed, and only for transitivisation errors with intransitive-only verbs (e.g., *The man laughed the girl). We conclude that preemption, entrenchment, and semantic effects are real, but are obscured by particular features of the present production task.

By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.

Scalar inferences occur when a weaker statement like It’s warm is used when a stronger one like It’s hot could have been used instead, resulting in the inference that whoever produced the weaker statement believes that the stronger statement does not hold. The rate at which this inference is drawn varies across scalar words, a result termed ‘scalar diversity’. Here, we study scalar diversity in adjectival scalar words from a usage-based perspective. We introduce novel operationalisations of several previously observed predictors of scalar diversity using computational tools based on usage data, allowing us to move away from existing judgment-based methods. In addition, we show in two experiments that, above and beyond these previously observed predictors, scalar diversity is predicted in part by the relevance of the scalar inference at hand. We introduce a corpus-based measure of relevance based on the idea that scalar inferences that are more relevant are more likely to occur in scalar constructions that draw an explicit contrast between scalar words (e.g., It’s warm but not hot). We conclude that usage has an important role to play in the establishment of common ground, a requirement for pragmatic inferencing.

This paper discusses the traceback method, which has been the basis of some influential papers on first language acquisition. The method sets out to demonstrate that many or even all utterances in a test corpus (usually the last two sessions of recording) can be accounted for with the help of recurrent fixed strings (like What’s that?) or frame-and-slot patterns (like [What’s X?]) that can also be identified in the remaining dataset (i.e., the previous sessions of recording). This is taken as evidence that language learning is much more item-based than previously assumed. In the present paper we sketch the development of the method over the last two decades, and discuss its relation to usage-based theory, as well as the cognitive plausibility of its components, and we highlight both its potential and its limitations.

Referential metonymy, e.g. ‘the moustache (= man with a moustache) sits down first’, appears early in L1 acquisition (Falkum, Recasens & Clark, 2017). Yet how does it emerge in pragmatically mature but linguistically developing adult L2 learners? We used one comprehension and two production tasks, based on Falkum and colleagues (2017), to investigate metonymy abilities in 34 Japanese adult learners of English as an additional language (EAL) and a control group of 31 native English speakers. We also examined how time constraints and exposure to examples of referential metonymy affected production. In the comprehension task, both EAL-learner and native-speaker participants chose metonymic readings at above chance levels. In both production tasks, all participants produced innovative metonyms. Additionally, the findings indicate that, in L2, exposure to examples dramatically increases metonymy production, while time pressure decreases it. The results suggest that participants can both comprehend and produce novel metonyms in L2, with a possible explicitness vs. production costs trade-off.

This paper addresses the development of epistemic verb–argument constructions in L2 Norwegian in four learners from a usage-based perspective. Usage-based theories hold that language learning is a gradual process of schematization. Recent research has pointed out that adult L2 learning may start out from both lexically specific and productive patterns, but also that formulaic language and semi-fixed patterns can persist for a long time in an L2. The aim of the present study is to trace how the schematization process unfolds in dense longitudinal data collected from learners in their second semester of intense Norwegian language studies, and to explore the interaction between formulaic and productive patterns in this period of language learning. The analyses show that the learners in general employ a limited repertoire of epistemic verbs, mainly tro ‘think’ and vite ‘know’. The level of productivity of tro and vite constructions varies across the learners: while one learner shows increasingly productive use of constructions with both verbs, other learners rely on semi-fixed construction patterns. A general conclusion is thus that formulaic and semi-fixed patterns are not restricted to initial phases of L2 learning and should be an object of attention at all levels of L2 competence.

Accumulating evidence suggests that people’s sense of the spatial location of events in time is flexible across cultures, contexts, and individuals. Yet few studies have established whether time spatialization is correlated with traumatic experiences. Based on findings that people tend to demonstrate a past time orientation when suffering from disasters, the present research investigated how earthquake experience is associated with temporal focus and time spatialization. Study 1 compared responses of residents in an earthquake-hit area with those of residents in a non-disaster area about two weeks after the disaster had occurred. The results showed that participants in the disaster area were more past-focused and produced more past-in-front responses than participants in the non-disaster area. In Study 2, a follow-up survey was conducted in the same areas ten months after the earthquake to examine whether the impact of disasters on spatial conceptions of time would decay as time elapsed. The findings indicated that participants in these two areas showed no differences in temporal focus and implicit space–time mappings. Taken together, these findings provide support for the Temporal Focus Hypothesis. They also have implications for understanding fluctuation in temporal focus and the high malleability of temporal mappings across individuals.

This paper investigates whether differences in grammar affect the production of discourse relations. We report the results of two story continuation experiments on speakers of two typologically unrelated languages, English and Korean, and in two different discourse genres, monologues (Experiment 1) and conversations (Experiment 2), focusing on the contrast between the explanation discourse relation and the result discourse relation. Since the grammar of clause linkage in Korean, but not English, disfavors a backward causal order (explanation relation), we predicted that Korean speakers are less likely to produce EXPLANATION continuations in MONOLOGUES than English speakers. We also predicted that this difference disappears in conversation, as questions that can be uttered in conversations are not subject to the same constraints on clause linkage in Korean. The results confirmed our predictions. The effect of language on the production of discourse relations in monologue suggests that LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES can affect speakers’ discourse expectation and production, while the absence of language effect in conversation suggests that this language effect is not due to differences in the way speakers causally relate events or to conceptual or cultural differences in preferences for iconic discourse between English and Korean speakers.

Boye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g., full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g., auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical–grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.

Overshadowing refers to the reduced learning or expression of the association between a weaker cue and an outcome in the presence of another stronger cue. The present study broadens the scope of investigation in second language acquisition (SLA), which has mainly focused on inflectional morphology, by extending it to learning two Chinese syntactic constructions, namely the Ba-construction and its SVO counterpart. Thirty L2 Chinese learners were first exposed to the target constructions via watching videos, and were then tested for comprehension and production. The results were three-fold: first and foremost, they yielded evidence of syntactic overshadowing of the Ba-construction by its SVO counterpart, resulting in the reduction of the quantity and quality of the Ba production; second, since the form–meaning mapping was successful for both the Ba and SVO construction, the syntactic overshadowing is more likely to be an expression deficit; and third, the pre-knowledge of verbs further confined the use of the Ba-construction, suggesting a moderating role of word entrenchment in L2 syntactic learning. These findings not only deepen our understanding of overshadowing at the syntactic level, but also offer a fresh perspective for addressing the challenges of L2 learning of the Chinese Ba-construction.

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).

In the context of theories of statistical learning, frequency of encounter is viewed as a major driving force in L2 acquisition. The present paper challenges this position with respect to core components at the level of language competence which relate to language-specific patterns in cognitive construal. Empirical evidence from very advanced L2 speakers (L1 French, L2 English and L2 German) shows that forms and constructions which are highly frequent in the target languages in the expression of motion events are not used in a target-like form by L2 speakers. The study shows how the basis for language use which is not target-like lies at the level of event construal: conceptual frames, which are language-specific and are deeply anchored in the course of L1 acquisition, drive allocation of attention and the extraction of forms in L2 acquisition. Findings in the domain of spatial cognition show that motion event frames based on the L1 take precedence over frequency of occurrence of forms in the target language as a factor in L2 use.