We offer an account of preposition drop under clausal ellipsis in terms of two language processing principles: Minimize Domains and Minimize Forms. We argue that when Minimize Domains operates within the PP domain, it disfavors preposition drop due to the preferred independent processability of the PP fragment. When it operates within the VP domain it favors preposition drop in proportion to the number and strength of semantic dependencies between V and P in a given language: the more dependencies there are, and the stronger they are, the stronger the preference for preposition drop. In this way fragments are avoided with long dependencies between P and a distant V. We demonstrate this pattern in English corpora and propose it as an explanation for the typologically unusual preference that English shows for NP fragments. Minimize Forms supports preposition drop in easy-to-process environments cross-linguistically and in English when the more minimal fragment (NP) can be easily linked to its correlate in the antecedent, disfavoring preposition drop elsewhere. The predictions of Minimize Domains and Minimize Forms receive support from a mixed-effects regression model fitted to data from spoken US English, and can be understood as motivations for construction-specific constraints and preferences in clausal ellipsis.

Most assessments of cognitive abilities are language bound (e.g., directions presented orally or written), even when not assessing linguistic ability. Understanding the relationship between bilingual language acquisition and outcomes on tests of cognitive abilities is critical, given the reliance on intelligence assessment for learning disability accommodations and intellectual disability diagnoses. Research has been mixed regarding the presence of a bilingual advantage or disadvantage on cognitive performance. Thus, the purpose of this review is to examine differences between several types of language users (i.e., early/late, simultaneous/sequential, English dominant / Spanish dominant/balanced), focusing on the relation between level of language acquisition and use and implications for outcomes on tests of cognitive abilities. To conduct the systematic review, guidelines from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) were used (Liberati et al., 2009). Fifty-two articles met eligibility criteria and are included in this review. Results from the systematic review suggest that bilinguals perform differently than monolinguals in several domains and may be considered neurologically unlike monolinguals. The paper concludes by advocating for the need for appropriate assessment instruments and norms specific for bilingual speakers, as currently available measures cannot reliably and accurately differentiate monolinguals with a language impairment from typically developing bilinguals.

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.

Looking at the way different linguistic communities speak about a universally shared domain of experience raises questions that are central to the language sciences. How can we compare meaning across languages? What is the interaction between language, thought, and perception? Does linguistic diversity entail linguistic relativism? The literature on the naming systems of the body across languages have addressed these questions with little consensus. In the present study, we contribute to this debate with a comparison of body part terms in French, Indonesian, and Japanese. Using an updated version of the body coloring task, we observed both diversity and cross-linguistically shared patterns. Importantly, we also observed that speakers of languages which violate the wrist/ankle joint boundary rule do not collapse the distinction in thought. This key finding goes against the conflation of language and thought and leads us to conclude that linguistic diversity does not entail linguistic relativism. Methodologically, we advocate for the use of a culturally neutral etic space as a necessary tool in semantic typology. Theoretically, we propose that language is a multilevel phenomenon, which results from the interaction of non-linguistic and cross-culturally shared embodied motivations, context-specific situated language use, and culturally specific sedimented linguistic conventions.

We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations, we used an identification task and a discrimination task with an experimental group of native listeners and a control group of Indonesian listeners, whose language employs none of the differences within either the falling or the rising pitch contours in its phonology. Only the lexical condition as perceived by the experimental group yielded sigmoid identification functions and a heightened discriminatory sensitivity around the midpoint of continua. The intonational condition in the native group and both conditions in the control group yielded gradient identification functions and smaller, reverse effects of the continuum midpoints in the discrimination task. The results are interpreted to mean that sentence modality contrasts can be expressed gradiently, but that lexical tone differences are represented phonologically, and hence are perceived categorically, despite low phonetic salience of the contrast. This conclusion challenges assumptions about the relation between linguistic functions and linguistic structures.

Onomatopoeia is widespread across the world’s languages. They represent a relatively simple iconic mapping: the phonological/phonetic properties of the word evokes acoustic related features of referents. Here, we explore the EEG correlates of processing onomatopoeia in English. Participants were presented with a written cue-word (e.g., leash) and then with a spoken target-word. The target-word was either an onomatopoeia (e.g., bark), a sound-related but arbitrary word (e.g., melody), or another arbitrary word (e.g., bike). Participants judged whether the cue- and the target-word were similar in meaning. We analysed Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in different time-windows: (i) early (100–200 and 200–250 ms) to assess differences in processing at the form-level; (ii) the N400 time-window (300–500 ms) in order to establish if there are differences in semantic processing across our word-types; and (iii) late (600–900 ms) to assess post-lexical effects. We found that onomatopoeia differed from the other words in the N400 time-window: when cue and target were unrelated, onomatopoeic words led to greater negativity which can be accounted for in terms of enhanced semantic activation of onomatopoeia which leads to greater salience of the mismatch. We discuss results in the context of a growing body of literature investigating iconicity in language processing and development.

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.

The Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors have provided a fertile testing ground for the psychological reality of space–time metaphors. Despite this, little research has targeted the linguistic patterns used in these two mappings. To fill that gap, the current study uses corpus data to examine the use of motion verbs in two typologically different languages, English and Spanish. We first investigated the relative frequency of the two metaphors. Whereas we observed no difference in frequency in the Spanish data, our findings indicated that in English, Moving Time expressions are more prevalent than are Moving Ego expressions. Second, we focused on the patterns of use of the verbs themselves, asking whether well-known typological patterns in the expression of spatial motion would carry over to temporal motion. Specifically, we examined the frequencies of temporal uses of path and manner verbs in English and in Spanish. Contra the patterns observed in space, we observed a preference for path verbs in both languages, with this preference more strongly evident in English than in Spanish. In addition, our findings revealed greater use of motion verbs in temporal expressions in Spanish compared to English. These findings begin to outline constraints on the aspects of spatial conceptualization that are likely to be reused in the conceptualization of time.

Gender has been the focus of linguistic and psychological studies, but little is known about its conceptual representation. We investigate whether the conceptual structure of gender – as expressed in participants’ free-listing responses – varies according to gender-related experiences in line with research on conceptual flexibility. Specifically, we tested groups that varied by gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender-normativity. We found that different people stressed distinct aspects of the concept. For example, normative individuals mainly relied on a bigenderist conception (e.g., male/female; man/woman), while non-normative individuals produced more aspects related to social context (e.g., queer, fluidity, construction). At a broader level, our results support the idea that gender is a multifaceted and flexible concept, constituted by social, biological, cultural, and linguistic components. Importantly, the meaning of gender is not exhausted by the classical dichotomy opposing sex, a biological fact, with gender as its cultural counterpart. Instead, both aspects are differentially salient depending on specific life experiences.

We investigated how verbal labels affect object categorization in bilinguals. In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories (an exception is sunflower), whereas in Chinese, some nouns provide category information morphologically (e.g., 鸵鸟- ostrich and 知更鸟- robin have the morpheme鸟- bird in their Chinese names), while some nouns do not (e.g., 企鹅- penguin and 鸽子- pigeon). We examined the effect of Chinese word structure on bilinguals’ categorization processes in two ERP experiments. Chinese–English bilinguals and English monolinguals judged the membership of atypical (e.g., ostrich, penguin) vs. typical (e.g., robin, pigeon) pictorial (Experiment 1) and English word (Experiment 2) exemplars of categories (e.g., bird). English monolinguals showed typicality effects in RT data, and in the N300 and N400 of ERP data, regardless of whether the object name had a category cue in Chinese. In contrast, Chinese–English bilinguals showed a larger typicality effect for objects without category cues in their name than objects with cues, even when they were tested in English. These results demonstrate that linguistic information in bilinguals’ L1 has an effect on their L2 categorization processes. The findings are explained using the label-feedback hypothesis.

Recent work suggests that not all aspects of learning benefit from an iconicity advantage (Ortega, 2017). We present the results of an artificial sign language learning experiment testing the hypothesis that iconicity may help learners to learn mappings between forms and meanings, whilst having a negative impact on learning specific features of the form. We used a 3D camera (Microsoft Kinect) to capture participants’ gestures and quantify the accuracy with which they reproduce the target gestures in two conditions. In the iconic condition, participants were shown an artificial sign language consisting of congruent gesture–meaning pairs. In the arbitrary condition, the language consisted of non-congruent gesture–meaning pairs. We quantified the accuracy of participants’ gestures using dynamic time warping (Celebi et. al., 2013). Our results show that participants in the iconic condition learn mappings more successfully than participants in the arbitrary condition, but there is no difference in the accuracy with which participants reproduce the forms. While our work confirms that iconicity helps to establish form–meaning mappings, our study did not give conclusive evidence about the effect of iconicity on production; we suggest that iconicity may only have an impact on learning forms when these are complex.

Psycholinguistic research has shown that conceptual metaphors influence how people produce and understand language (e.g., Gibbs, 1994, 2017a; Kövecses, 2015; Jacobs & Kinder, 2017). So far, investigations have mostly paid attention to non-poetic metaphor comprehension. This focus stems from the original discovery of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that much of everyday, non-poetic language is metaphorical. The present study aims to expand this focus and explores whether people access conceptual metaphors during poetry interpretation. To answer this question, we conducted a psycholinguistic experiment in which 38 participants, all native speakers of English, completed two tasks. In each task, participants read excerpts of poetry containing conceptual metaphors before selecting or rating items that indicated their implicit and explicit awareness of the conceptual metaphors. The results of both tasks show that participants retrieve conceptual metaphors when reading poetry. This provides empirical evidence in favor of the idea that crucial aspects of poetic thought and language arise from conceptual metaphor.

This study investigated the comprehension of plural morphosyntactic markers and its relationship with numerical comparison abilities in children with Down syndrome (DS). It evaluated 16 Spanish-speaking children with DS (mean verbal mental age = 3;6) and 16 typically developing children with similar receptive vocabulary (mean chronological age = 3;5). Children participated in two preferential looking tasks assessing their abilities to map singular and plural markers to their visual referents and to distinguish one object from more than one. Results showed that both groups of children correctly mapped plural markers to their referents but failed to map singular ones. Furthermore, results also indicated that both groups also looked at collections of more than one object with four objects but not at those with two. The eye movement patterns of children who looked at collections of more than one object suggest a counting-like strategy. These results indicate that comprehension of plural markers of children with DS is similar to that of their typically developing peers; however, it is not related to their numerical abilities.

This paper investigates the underlying cognitive processes of sound–color associations by connecting perceptual evidence from research on cross-modal correspondences to sound symbolic patterns in the words for colors in natural languages. Building upon earlier perceptual experiments, we hypothesized that sonorous and bright phonemes would be over-represented in the words for bright and saturated colors. This hypothesis was tested on eleven color words and related concepts (red–green, yellow–blue, black–white, gray, night–day, dark–light) from 245 language families. Textual data was transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and each phoneme was described acoustically using high-quality IPA recordings. These acoustic measurements were then correlated with the luminance and saturation of each color obtained from cross-linguistic color-naming data in the World Color Survey. As expected, vowels with high brightness and sonority ratings were over-represented in the words for colors with high luminance, while sonorous consonants were more common in the words for saturated colors. We discuss these results in relation to lexicalization patterns and the links between iconicity and perceptual cross-modal associations.

The present approach estimates the strength of intensifiers in Dutch by computing their information values in a language corpus, that is, contextual information content (Cohen Priva, 2008; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011) and Shannon Information (Shannon & Weaver, 1948), to respectively explain the use value and the expressive value of intensifiers when they intensify a predicative adjective. Conflicting strength values help in understanding the high number of intensifiers commonly available in particular languages and the constant need for adding new ones. Our approach underlines the relevance of two measures of information content (IC) for ranking intensifiers: (i) IC in context: the more combinatorial or transitional options an intensifier has, the higher its contextual information content and consequently its use value; and (ii) IC in relation to all alternative intensifiers: the higher the surprisal value that the occurrence of an intensifier evokes, the higher its expressive value. We shall investigate the validity of these two measures by researching a large corpus of Dutch tweets and shall test whether the values of these two measures can predict the stacking order in sequences of intensifiers.

The English lexicon is quite impoverished in capturing the perceptual detail of odour qualities. To make up for the lack of smell vocabulary, speakers will often resort to source-based descriptions, a strategy that likens smells to real-world reference points, like ‘mint’. This study examines the instances when Australian English speakers use particular communicative strategies, to explore whether cultural or cognitive influences allow for the easier abstraction of odour qualities. This study combines (1) an odour description task, and (2) a similarity-based sorting task. The results of (1) show that the communicative preferences for describing smells are indeed reliant on source-based descriptions, and the results of (2) show that conceptualisation of odours is primarily based on hedonic valence, and secondarily on salient scents. By combining these results, I find that the communicative preferences vary depending on the conceptualisations of a scent. Scents judged as pleasant receive relatively more abstract descriptions, like ‘sweet’, and show a higher degree of agreement, and the source-based descriptions are particularly frequent among culturally salient scents.

This corpus study explores how sound events are communicated in English and Spanish. The aims are to (i) contribute production data for a better understanding of the couplings of meanings and their realizations, (ii) account for typological differences between the languages, and (iii) further the theoretical discussion of how sound is conceptualized through the window of language. We found that, while there are significant differences between the languages with respect to how sound events are communicated, they are similar with respect to what domains the sound descriptions are instantiated in, namely perception, motion, manipulation, emotion-reaction, consumption, and cognition. One striking difference has to do with the conflation of sound for action, e.g., creak, squeak, and sound for motion, e.g., slam, crash. This finding supports the received view of English as a language that may lexicalize manner in those kinds of verbs, while Spanish expresses manner through qualifiers outside the verb. Moreover, both languages employ three different perspectives on the soundscapes: Producer-, Experiencer-, and Phenomenon-based. While English favours the Producer perspective, Spanish features an even distribution between Producer and Experiencer. Phenomenon-based descriptions are relatively few in both languages.

In this study we explore whether different types of iconic gestures (i.e., acting, drawing, representing) and their combinations are used systematically to distinguish between different semantic categories in production and comprehension. In Study 1, we elicited silent gestures from Mexican and Dutch participants to represent concepts from three semantic categories: actions, manipulable objects, and non-manipulable objects. Both groups favoured the acting strategy to represent actions and manipulable objects; while non-manipulable objects were represented through the drawing strategy. Actions elicited primarily single gestures whereas objects elicited combinations of different types of iconic gestures as well as pointing. In Study 2, a different group of participants were shown gestures from Study 1 and were asked to guess their meaning. Single-gesture depictions for actions were more accurately guessed than for objects. Objects represented through two-gesture combinations (e.g., acting + drawing) were more accurately guessed than objects represented with a single gesture. We suggest iconicity is exploited to make direct links with a referent, but when it lends itself to ambiguity, individuals resort to combinatorial structures to clarify the intended referent. Iconicity and the need to communicate a clear signal shape the structure of silent gestures and this in turn supports comprehension.

Are communicators perceived as committed to what they actually say (what is explicit), or to what they mean (including what is implicit)? Some research claims that explicit communication leads to a higher attribution of commitment and more accountability than implicit communication. Here we present theoretical arguments and experimental data to the contrary. We present three studies exploring whether the saying–meaning distinction affects commitment attribution in promises, and, crucially, whether commitment attribution is further modulated by the degree to which the hearer will actually rely on the promise. Our results support the conclusion that people perceive communicators to be committed to ‘what is meant’, and not simply to ‘what is said’. Our findings add to the experimental literature showing that the saying–meaning distinction is not as pivotal to social relations as often assumed, and that its role in commitment attribution might be overestimated. The attribution of commitment is strongly dependent on the (mutually known) relevance of ‘what is meant’.

It is assumed from a usage-based perspective that learner language constructions emerge from natural language use in social interaction through exemplar learning. In L1, young learners have been shown to develop their constructions from lexically specific, formulaic expressions into more productive, abstract schemas. A similar developmental path has been shown for L2 development, with some exceptions. The aim of the current study is to explore to what extent the default assumption holds for L2 learning. The development of two constructions was traced in four adults learning L2 Finnish. Free-response data, collected weekly over a period of 9 months, were used to investigate the productivity of the constructions. The results show that, contrary to the traditional assumption, L2 learners do not start off with only lexically specific expressions, but that both lexically specific and more productive constructions are used from the beginning. Our results therefore suggest that, for educated adult L2 learners, the schema formation can happen rather quickly and even without the repetition of a specific lexical sequence.