This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages.

The present ERP study investigates the neural correlates of pictorial context effects on compositional-semantic processing. We examined whether the incremental processing of questions involving quantifier restriction is modulated by the reliability of pictorial information. Contexts either allowed for an unambiguous meaning evaluation at an early sentential position or were ambiguous with respect to whether a further restrictive cue could trigger later meaning revisions. Attention was either guided towards (Experiment 1) or away from (Experiment 2) the picture–question mapping. In both experiments, negative answers elicited a broadly distributed negativity opposed to affirmative answers as soon as an unambiguous truth evaluation was possible. In the presence of ambiguous context information, the truth evaluation initially remained underspecified, as an early commitment would have resulted in the risk of a semantic reanalysis. The negativity was followed by a late positivity in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that attention towards the mismatch affected semantic processing, but only at a later time window. The current results are consistent with the notion that an incremental meaning evaluation is dependent on the reliability of contextual information.

In English, the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor construes time as moving forward toward the ego. Recent research has provided evidence that people’s metaphorical perspectives on deictic time may be influenced by experiences—both spatial and non-spatial—that are connected to approach motivations (Moving Ego) and avoidance motivations (Moving Time). We extend this research further, asking whether there are differences in preferred temporal perspective between those who exhibit higher and lower degrees of power, as high power has been connected to approach motivations and low power, to avoidance motivations. Across two temporal tasks, participants in our study who adopted high-power poses demonstrated a greater preference for the Moving Ego perspective, compared to those adopting low-power poses. These results suggest an embodied connection between approach and avoidance motivations and the Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors, respectively.

When describing motion in space, speakers of French and German are known to show different preferences. In French, the verb typically encodes the path, whereas in German the manner in which the figure moves is mapped onto the verb. In this paper, this difference between the two languages is investigated, drawing on the data produced by forty participants. All participants are multilinguals, with German and French as their two strongest languages. They described fifty video clips in two sessions, once in monolingual and once in bilingual mode. The critical stimuli were always described in German in both language modes, the fillers in German in monolingual mode but in French in bilingual mode. The analyses of the manner and path verb uses show that, in a bilingual mode, speakers significantly converge towards the French model, that is, they reduce the preference for manner verbs and increase the proportion of path verbs.

During narrative retelling, speakers shift between different viewpoints to reflect how they conceptualize the events that unfolded. These viewpoints can be indicated through gestural means as well as through verbal ones. Studies of co-speech gestures have inferred viewpoint from gesture form, i.e., how entities are mapped onto the (primarily manual) articulators, but the merits of this approach have not been discussed. The present study argues that viewpoint is more than gestural form. Despite connections between the two, many other factors may influence a gesture’s form. Assessing viewpoint from gesture form alone limits the applicability of gestural viewpoint as a window onto speakers’ event conceptualization and introduces unnecessary differences in the categorization of viewpoint across gestures types. The present study examines iconic co-speech gestures in Danish narratives, and makes explicit the means used to infer gestural viewpoint. The approach advocated here ensures that the notion of viewpoint can be applied in a principled way to all or most iconic gestures.

The present paper investigates the sense making practices of participants in interaction within the context of reception studies of advertising and explores the cognitive nature of intertextuality and interdiscursivity as evidence of conceptual integration. The paper argues that sense making, through its intertextual and interdiscursive nature, is a carrier of attitudinal disposition which is manifested in the lexical selection of evaluative items arising from conceptual integration. The data examined for this study were collected from informants in focus groups when discussing a series of printed adverts that make reference to works of art. The results of the analysis indicate that intertextuality and interdiscursivity can be seen as constituting evidence of the conceptual phenomena of blending theory in sense making from where evaluative disposition emerges. They further suggest that both are processes in the audience’s sense making process rather than merely a feature of texts.

Aims. Morphological skills in Williams syndrome (WS) are a controversial issue, particularly cross-linguistically. Methods. We assessed pluralization patterns of nouns, inflection of verbs in the past, and gender assignment, inflection, and agreement within the noun phrase in a sample of Spanish-speaking children with WS compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age (VA-TD) and on chronological age (CA-TD) age. Results. Children with WS attribute grammatical gender correctly in a production task, but they have problems with inferring the referent’s sex from the gender of the noun in a comprehension task. Additionally, they correctly pluralize nouns and properly inflect regular verbs, but they have problems with irregular verbs. Our findings suggest that they have mastered the productive rules, but they perform like younger children regarding irregular items.