Does temporal thought extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? Do asymmetries depend on cultural differences in temporal focus? Some studies suggest that people in Western (arguably future-focused) cultures perceive the future as being closer, more valued, and deeper than the past (a future asymmetry), while the opposite is shown in East Asian (arguably past-focused) cultures. The proposed explanations of these findings predict a negative relationship between past and future: the more we delve into the future, the less we delve into the past. Here, we report findings that pose a significant challenge to this view. We presented several tasks previously used to measure temporal asymmetry (self-continuity, time discounting, temporal distance, and temporal depth) and two measures of temporal focus to American, Spanish, Serbian, Bosniak, Croatian, Moroccan, Turkish, and Chinese participants (total N = 1,075). There was an overall future asymmetry in all tasks except for temporal distance, but the asymmetry only varied with cultural temporal focus in time discounting. Past and future held a positive (instead of negative) relation in the mind: the more we delve into the future, the more we delve into the past. Finally, the findings suggest that temporal thought has a complex underlying structure.

Languages differ in the way motion events are encoded. In satellite-framed languages, motion verbs typically encode manner, while in verb-framed languages, path. We investigated the ways in which satellite-framed Dutch and verb-framed Turkish co-determine one’s attention to motion events in early bilinguals. In an EEG oddball paradigm, Turkish–Dutch bilinguals (n = 25) and Dutch controls (n = 27) watched short video clips of motion events, followed by a still picture that matched the preceding video in four ways (oddball design: 10% full match, 10% manner match, 10% endpoint match, and 70% full mismatch). We found that both groups showed similar oddball P300 effects, associated with task-related attention. Group differences were revealed in a late positivity (LP): The endpoint-match elicited a larger LP than the manner-match in the bilinguals, which may reflect language-driven attention. Our results indicate that cross-linguistic manner encoding difference impacts attention at a later stage.

Across sign languages, nouns can be derived from verbs through morphophonological changes in movement by (1) movement reduplication and size reduction or (2) size reduction alone. We asked whether these cross-linguistic similarities arise from cognitive biases in how humans construe objects and actions. We tested nonsigners’ sensitivity to differences in noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language (ASL) by asking MTurk workers to match images of actions and objects to videos of ASL noun–verb pairs. Experiment 1a’s match-to-sample paradigm revealed that nonsigners interpreted all signs, regardless of lexical class, as actions. The remaining experiments used a forced-matching procedure to avoid this bias. Counter our predictions, nonsigners associated reduplicated movement with actions not objects (inversing the sign language pattern) and exhibited a minimal bias to associate large movements with actions (as found in sign languages). Whether signs had pantomimic iconicity did not alter nonsigners’ judgments. We speculate that the morphophonological distinctions in noun–verb pairs observed in sign languages did not emerge as a result of cognitive biases, but rather as a result of the linguistic pressures of a growing lexicon and the use of space for verbal morphology. Such pressures may override an initial bias to map reduplicated movement to actions, but nevertheless reflect new iconic mappings shaped by linguistic and cognitive experiences.

Many studies have substantiated the perceptual symbol system, which assumes a routine generation of perceptual information during language comprehension, but little is known about the processing format in which the perceptual information of different dimensions is conveyed simultaneously during sentence comprehension. The current study provides the first experimental evidence of how multidimensional perceptual information (color and shape) was processed during online sentence comprehension in Mandarin. We designed three consecutive sentence–picture verification tasks that only differed in the delay of the display of pictures preceded by declarative sentences. The processing was analyzed in three stages based on time intervals (i.e., 0ms, +750ms, +1500ms). The response accuracy and response time data were reported. The initial stage (i.e., ISI=0ms) attested the match effect of color and shape, but the simulated representation of color and shape did not interact. In the intermediate stage (i.e., ISI=750ms), the routinely simulated color and shape interacted, but the match facilitation was found only in cases where one perceptual information was in mismatch while the other was not. In the final stage (i.e., ISI=1500ms), the match facilitation of one particular perceptual property was influenced by a mismatch with the other perceptual property. These results suggested that multiple perceptual information presented simultaneously was processed in an additive manner to a large extent before entering into the final stage, where the simulated perceptual information was integrated in a multiplicative manner. The results also suggested that color and shape were comparable to object recognition when conjointly conveyed. In relation to other evidence from behavioral and event-related potential studies on sentence reading in the discussion, we subscribed to the idea that the full semantic integration became available over time.

Much prior research has investigated how humans understand time using body-based contrasts like front/back and left/right. It has recently come to light, however, that some communities instead understand time using environment-based contrasts. Here, we present the richest portrait yet of one such case: the topographic system used by the Yupno of Papua New Guinea, in which the past is construed as downhill and the future as uphill. We first survey topographic concepts in Yupno language and culture, showing how they constitute a privileged resource for communicating about space. Next, we survey time concepts in Yupno, focusing on how topographic concepts are used to construe past, present, and future. We then illustrate how this topographic understanding of time comes to life in the words, hands, and minds of Yupno speakers. Drawing on informal interviews, we offer a view of the topographic system that goes beyond a community-level summary, and offers a glimpse of its individual-level and moment-to-moment texture. Finally, we step back to account for how this topographic understanding of time is embedded within a rich cognitive ecology of linguistic, cultural, gestural, and architectural practices. We close by discussing an elusive question: Why is the future uphill?

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.

This study examines differences in gesture production in narrative contexts between American and Chol Mayan speakers at the narrative, metanarrative, and paranarrative levels of discourse, as well as differences in the production of linear temporal gestures. First, a comparison is made between the gestures produced by speakers of American English and Chol, a Western Maya language, as they tell the story of A Christmas Carol to an interviewer. The study shows a dire contrast between the American and Chol interpretation of this classic novel, and notable differences in the speech-accompanying gestures used by Americans and Chol Mayans respectively. American speakers’ temporal utterances are often accompanied by the well-documented lateral timeline gestures, where earlier events are located to the left of the gestural space, and later events are located to the right of the gestural space. By contrast, in Chol utterances no lateral, sagittal, or vertical timeline gestures accompany any form of temporal reference; the vast majority of gestures co-occur with metanarrative and paranarrative statements and have no explicit temporal content. The second part of the study analyzes the gestures made by a Chol speaker while telling a traditional story. A qualitative analysis of this traditional narrative shows that, when telling a story of the Chol tradition that is well known to the speaker, pragmatically-motivated gestures that occur at the metanarrative and paranarrative levels are much fewer than gestures occurring at the narrative level. In this traditional narrative, the gestures co-occurring with sequential, deictic temporal expressions and temporal metaphors did not reflect any kind of timeline that resembled those made by the American speakers in the Dickens in Chol task.

The world’s languages draw on different reference frames to encode spatial relationships between people, objects or places. We address how subtle differences in reference frame preferences across Spanish and English affect Spanish–English bilinguals’ interpretations of spatial descriptions involving the terms left and right. Bilinguals saw an entity (‘object’; e.g., a vase or a human) with a circle on either side, along with a description of the location of a ball relative to the object (e.g., The ball is to the right of the vase or The ball is on the vase’s right). Their task was to decide which circle indicated the ball’s location. Results showed that syntax and object type contributed differently to bilinguals’ responses: Effects of syntax patterned with Spanish preferences, whereas effects of object type patterned with English preferences. English language exposure subtly affected bilinguals’ response choices. Results are discussed with respect to experience-based theories of language processing.

The past couple of decades have seen a substantial increase in linguistic research that highlights the non-arbitrariness of language, as manifested in motivated sound–meaning correspondences. Yet one of the challenges of such studies is that there is a relative paucity of data-driven analyses, especially in the case of languages other than English, such as Hungarian, even though the proportion of at least partially motivated words in Hungarian vocabulary is substantial. We address this gap by investigating the relationship between Hungarian phoneme classes and positive/negative sentiment based on 3,023 word forms retrieved from the Hungarian Sentiment Lexicon. Our results indicate that positive polarity word forms tend to contain more vowels, front vowels, continuants, fricatives, palatals, and sibilants. On the other hand, negative sentiment polarity words tend to have more rounded vowels, plosives, and dorsal consonants. While our analysis provides strong evidence for a set of non-arbitrary form–meaning relationships, effect sizes also reveal that such associations tend to be fairly weak tendencies, and therefore sentiment polarity cannot be derived from the relative frequencies of phoneme classes in a deterministic fashion.