Two studies investigated whether knowledge about ontological category membership exists early in the word learning process—specifically, when words are partially known—and if so, how such knowledge is represented. Participants made decisions about the ontological category membership of words at three levels of knowledge: words they correctly defined (known), words recognized as familiar (frontier), and words mistakenly identified as nonwords (unknown). Accuracy on this task improved as a function of word level. Participants were able to identify the broad ontological categories to which words at all three levels of knowledge belonged, as well as the more specific ontological categories to which the words belonged. Overall, results indicated that knowledge about ontological category membership is available for words at very low levels of knowledge, and that this knowledge does not necessarily follow the strict hierarchical organization some ontological systems are thought to embody (e.g. Keil 1979). Implications for the acquisition and representation of word meanings are discussed.

When they process sentences, language comprehenders activate perceptual and motor representations of described scenes. On the “immersed experiencer” account, comprehenders engage motor and perceptual systems to create experiences that someone participating in the described scene would have. We tested two predictions of this view. First, the distance of mentioned objects from the protagonist of a described scene should produce perceptual correlates in mental simulations. And second, mental simulation of perceptual features should be multimodal, like actual perception of such features. In Experiment 1, we found that language about objects at different distances modulated the size of visually simulated objects. In Experiment 2, we found a similar effect for volume in the auditory modality. These experiments lend support to the view that language-driven mental simulation encodes experiencer-specific spatial details. The fact that we obtained similar simulation effects for two different modalities—audition and vision—confirms the multimodal nature of mental simulations during language understanding.

We examine whether pronoun interpretation is affected by naturalistic co-speech gesture. Participants in three conditions watched narrations containing ambiguous pronouns. In one condition the narrator produced gestures consistent with order-of-mention; in another, they conflicted with order-of-mention; and in the third, she did not gesture. Results showed that when the gestures conflicted with order-of-mention participants were much less likely to interpret the pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character. In a second experiment we ruled out the possibility that participants were simply picking up on differences within the speech itself. These results extend previous work on gesture and language processing by showing that the information in gesture can influence the way people interpret words which by their nature are ambiguous, and that this influence is similar to that of well-known speech internal cues.

The notion of duality of patterning (henceforth DoP), at least for readers of this special issue, is probably most closely associated with Charles F. Hockett's project of identifying the ‘design features’ of language in order to characterise the ways in which human language is unique among biological communication systems (Hockett 1958: chapter 64; Hockett 1960; Hockett and Ascher 1964). Roughly speaking, DoP refers to the fact that the meaningful units of language – words or morphemes – are made up of meaningless units – phonemes or features – whose only function is to distinguish the meaningful units from one another. Stated this way, the idea seems quite straightforward, and to have it explicitly stated as a property of language seems a useful insight. In fact, though, of all the design features discussed by Hockett, DoP seems to have engendered the most confusion. The idea that meaningful units are composed of meaningless ones seems simple enough, but many complications arise when we look more closely. The goal of this short paper is to document some of the complications and perhaps alleviate some of the confusion.

In the literature on motion events, a lot of previous research can be found on the contrast between the typology of expression favoured by so-called ‘verb-framed languages’ and that favoured by so-called ‘satellite-framed languages.’ Only some of this previous research, however, has focused its attention on the reasons that ultimately bring about such contrasting fashions of speaking. The present study explores this issue in some depth by trying to identify what specific grammatical constraints lead Italian speakers to be shy of the use of manner verbs in the expression of motion events (at least when compared with speakers of a typical satellite-framed language such as English). The outcome of an interpretation task and a grammatical judgement task conducted with some Italian native speakers suggests that this phenomenon ultimately originates from features exhibited by the Italian system of spatial prepositions, as well as from features exhibited by a certain kind of Italian manner verbs. The constraints caused by the verbs appear to be particularly significant.

The present research examines the effects of body-object interaction (BOI) on eye gaze behaviour in a reading task. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. A set of high BOI words (e.g. cat) and a set of low BOI words (e.g. sun) were selected, matched on imageability and concreteness (as well as other lexical and semantic variables). Facilitatory BOI effects were observed: gaze durations and total fixation durations were shorter for high BOI words, and participants made fewer regressions to high BOI words. The results provide evidence of a BOI effect on non-manual responses and in a situation that taps normal reading processes. We discuss how the results (a) suggest that stored motor information (as measured by BOI ratings) is relevant to lexical semantics, and (b) are consistent with an embodied view of cognition (Wilson 2002).

Speakers adapt their speech based on both prior expectations and incoming cues about their addressees' informational needs (Kuhlen and Brennan 2010). Here, we investigate whether top-down information, such as speakers' expectations about addressees' attentiveness, and bottom-up cues, such as addressees' feedback during conversation, also influence speakers' gestures. In 39 dyads, addressees were either attentive when speakers told a joke or else distracted by a second task, while speakers expected addressees to be either attentive or distracted. Independently of adjustments in speech, both speakers' expectations and addressees' feedback shaped quantitative and qualitative aspects of gesturing. Speakers gestured more frequently when their prior expectations matched addressees' actual behavior. Moreover, speakers with attentive addressees gestured more in the periphery of gesture space when they expected addressees to be attentive. These systematic adjustments in gesturing suggest that speakers flexibly adapt to their addressees by integrating bottom-up cues available during the interaction in light of attributions made from top-down expectations. That these sources of information lead to adjustments patterning similarly in speech and gesture informs theoretical frameworks of how different modalities are deployed and coordinated in dialogue.

This study measures whether number and type of morphemes in an elicited imitation string result in a greater number of modifications with L2 experience. Rationale is drawn from L2 working memory processing limitations at distinct levels of proficiency. 38 subjects (L2 Spanish university students) comprise three proficiency groups: beginning, undergraduate majors and graduate students. Number of morphemes was varied within each syllable count; and responses were either correct or modified (lexemically/inflectionally as deletions or substitutions). One or two way ANOVAs determined significance between mean proportions for each group. Findings indicate that increases in number of morphemes yielded significant differences, and that while the lowest proficiency group produced higher proportions of lexical deletions, the modifications made by more advanced groups were inflectional substitutions.

The present paper analyses the meaning of Spanish mood in factive contexts from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. It is argued that terms like assertion and presupposition do not explain the semantics of the subjunctive. Rather, they constitute an initial classification for finding a conceptually grounded explanation of it. The hypothesis is put forward that mood choice in factive contexts can be explained by the elaboration of Maldonado's (1995) notions of dominion and control. On the one hand, the conceptualizer has a low degree of effective control over the described event in presupposed contexts where the subjunctive mood occurs. On the other hand, presupposed contexts with the verb in the indicative mood equates with epistemic control over the described event. Thus, it is argued that the meaning of the subjunctive mood is related to the conceptualizer's epistemic dominion, and to the dominion of effective control. An additional analysis of the subjunctive mood in volitional, causative and perceptual contexts corroborates the initial claim.

As more of the world's languages are described and compared, more absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspondences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utterances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations appear to be confirmed by natural language data.

There exists a fundamental paradox in linguistic cognition. Experiments show consistent sound-symbolic biases in people's processing of artificial words, yet the biases are not manifest in the structure of real words. To address this paradox, we designed an experiment to test the magnitude and source of these biases. Participants were tasked with matching nonsense words to novel object forms. One group was implicitly taught a matching rule congruent with biases reported previously, while a second group was taught a rule incongruent with this bias. In test trials, participants in the congruent condition performed only modestly but significantly better than chance and better than participants in the incongruent condition who performed at chance. These outcomes indicate the processing bias is real but weak and reflects an inherent learning bias. We discuss implications for language learning and transmission, considering the functional value of non-arbitrariness in language structure and underlying neurocognitive mechanisms.

The concept of duality of patterning (henceforth DP) has recently begun to undergo new scrutiny. In particular, the fact that Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) does not appear to exhibit a layer of meaningless units (Sandler et al. 2011) casts doubt on the universality of DP as a defining feature of natural language. Why, then, do the vast majority of the world's languages exhibit DP? Two hypotheses have been suggested. The first is that DP is a necessary solution to the problem of conveying a large number of meanings; the second is that DP arises as a consequence of conventionalization. We tested these hypotheses in an experimental-semiotics study. Our results supported the hypothesis based on conventionalization but were inconclusive with regard to the hypothesis based on the number of meanings. At the same time, the task of measuring DP in an experimental-semiotics study presented interesting challenges, suggesting that the concept of DP may need some overhauling.

The question of whether different linguistic patterns differentially influence semantic and conceptual representations is of central interest in cognitive science. In this paper, we investigate whether the regular encoding of shape within a nominal classification system leads to an increased salience of shape in speakers' semantic representations by comparing English, (Amazonian) Spanish, and Bora, a shape-based classifier language spoken in the Amazonian regions of Columbia and Peru. Crucially, in displaying obligatory use, pervasiveness in grammar, high discourse frequency, and phonological variability of forms corresponding to particular shape features, the Bora classifier system differs in important ways from those in previous studies investigating effects of nominal classification, thereby allowing better control of factors that may have influenced previous findings. In addition, the inclusion of Spanish monolinguals living in the Bora village allowed control for the possibility that differences found between English and Bora speakers may be attributed to their very different living environments. We found that shape is more salient in the semantic representation of objects for speakers of Bora, which systematically encodes shape, than for speakers of English and Spanish, which do not. Our results are consistent with assumptions that semantic representations are shaped and modulated by our specific linguistic experiences.

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