Speakers move their hands when they talk—they gesture. These gestures can signal whether the speaker is ready to learn a particular task and, in this sense, provide a window onto the speaker's knowledge. But gesture can do more than reflect knowledge. It can play a role in changing knowledge in at least two ways: indirectly through its effects on communication with the learner, and directly through its effects on the learner's cognition. Gesturing is, however, not limited to learners. Speakers who are proficient in a task also gesture. Their gestures have a different relation to speech than the gestures that novices produce, and seem to support cognition rather than change it. Gesturing can thus serve as a tool for thinking and for learning.

Onomatopoeia appear in high quantities in many infants’ earliest words, yet there is minimal research in this area. Instead, findings from the wider iconicity literature are generalised to include onomatopoeia, leading to the assumption that their iconic status makes them inherently learnable, thereby prompting their early production. In this review we bring together the literature on onomatopoeia specifically and iconicity more generally to consider infants’ acquisition from three perspectives: perception, production, and interaction. We consider these findings in relation to Imai and Kita’s (2014) ‘sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis’ to determine whether their framework can account for onomatopoeia alongside other iconic forms.

We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a significant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system, artifact, and construction. We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequences of embodied human minds born into and embedded in intersubjective environments filled with and shaped by documents and their circulation. The closed system of United States Supreme Court opinions makes an excellent case for a theory of document acts that will eventually be used to understand and explain more open-ended systems.

Some more recent lines of research converge on claiming that human cognitive behavior in general and linguistic discourse in particular cannot reasonably be reduced to one monolithic system of cognitive activity. What this research suggests, rather, is that this behavior exhibits a dualistic organization. In the present paper, two frameworks representing this tradition are contrasted, namely Discourse Grammar and the dual process model. The former rests on observations on language structure and language use, while the latter was developed on the basis of neurolinguistic observations. The two frameworks converge on claiming that there is a significant correlation between linguistic categorization and hemisphere-based brain activity. The present paper argues that this correlation can be related to contrasting linguistic functions associated with each of the two hemispheres.

The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.

In this paper we bring together several lines of cross-linguistic research to demonstrate the role of prototypicality in young children's acquisition of the transitive construction. Much research has shown that young children are slow to form abstract constructions because they fail to see the more general applicability of syntactic markers such as word order and case marking. Here we attempt to explain this fact by investigating the nature of the language children do and do not hear, specifically, the reliability and availability of the linguistic cues they are exposed to. We suggest that constructions redundantly marked with multiple cues could have a special status as a nucleus around which the prototype forms—which makes it difficult for them to isolate the functional significance of each cue. The implications of this view for language acquisition are discussed within a usage-based framework.

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to the heated debate on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification (Nuyts, 2001, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Traugott, 2003, 2010, 2012; Verhagen, 2005; Narrog, 2010, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012). I will argue that intersubjectivity, intended as a subject’s awareness of the other persona(s)’ feelings, knowledge, and beliefs, can be construed alternatively on an ‘immediate’ and on an ‘extended’ level. Immediate intersubjectivity (I-I) corresponds to the mutual awareness of the speech participants during the ongoing speech event, whereas extended intersubjectivity (E-I) includes an assumed third party (specific or generic) who has an indirect social bearing on the utterance (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014). Along a unidirectional cline of change, extended intersubjectification constitutes a further stage of semantic and/or grammatical reanalysis with respect to its immediate counterpart. In order to empirically justify the diachronic continuum between the two, I provide some corpus-illustrated (cf. Tummers et al., 2005, p. 235) examples from Mandarin and corpus-based evidence about the constructions [you don’t want X] and believe it or not in American English.

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.

This paper presents an algorithm for learning the construction grammar of a language from a large corpus. This grammar induction algorithm has two goals: first, to show that construction grammars are learnable without highly specified innate structure; second, to develop a model of which units do or do not constitute constructions in a given dataset. The basic task of construction grammar induction is to identify the minimum set of constructions that represents the language in question with maximum descriptive adequacy. These constructions must (1) generalize across an unspecified number of units while (2) containing mixed levels of representation internally (e.g., both item-specific and schematized representations), and (3) allowing for unfilled and partially filled slots. Additionally, these constructions may (4) contain recursive structure within a given slot that needs to be reduced in order to produce a sufficiently schematic representation. In other words, these constructions are multi-length, multi-level, possibly discontinuous co-occurrences which generalize across internal recursive structures. These co-occurrences are modeled using frequency and the ΔP measure of association, expanded in novel ways to cover multi-unit sequences. This work provides important new evidence for the learnability of construction grammars as well as a tool for the automated corpus analysis of constructions.

In certain English finite complement clauses, inclusion of the complementizer that is optional. Previous research has identified various factors that influence when native speakers tend to produce or omit the complementizer, including syntactic weight, clause juncture constraints, and predicate frequency. The present study addresses the question to what extent German and Spanish learners of English as a second language (L2) produce and omit the complementizer under similar conditions. 3,622 instances of English adjectival, object, and subject complement constructions were retrieved from the International Corpus of English and the German and Spanish components of the International Corpus of Learner English. A logistic regression model suggests that L2 learners’ and natives’ production is largely governed by the same factors. However, in comparison with native speakers, L2 learners display a lower rate of complementizer omission. They are more impacted by processing-related factors such as complexity and clause juncture, and less sensitive to verb-construction cue validity.

Comprehension of unfamiliar metaphors (mercy blanket) is an effortful cognitive process that requires the formation of a novel metaphoric mapping between two disparate domains during which irrelevant properties have to be suppressed. The present study aims to examine the relationship between the comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors and working memory. Three experiments were conducted: a comprehension task (Experiment 1), a recognition task (Experiments 2a and 2b), and a free recall task (Experiment 3). In the first experiment comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors correlated with digit span backward but not with digit span forward. Results of the second experiment revealed that unfamiliar metaphors induced a higher rate of semantic errors relative to phonological errors, whereas familiar metaphors induced the same number of phonological and semantic errors. The third experiment confirmed that unfamiliar metaphors were harder to recall than were familiar metaphors. These findings show that working memory capacity may be involved in the computation of unfamiliar metaphoric interpretations, and more specifically in the process of suppressing irrelevant information via the central executive. Familiar metaphor recognition may rely on either phonological codes that are maintained in the phonological loop or on semantic processing that involves long term storage.

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.

Embodied models of language comprehension are based on the assumption that words become associated with sensorimotor experiences during initial word learning. To test this hypothesis, adult participants learned artificial words as labels for novel objects in a multisensory environment. In a word learning phase, novel objects were located in the participant’s upper or lower visual field and participants learned the objects’ names by interacting with them. In a test phase, participants responded to the color of the words with either an upwards or a downwards directed arm movement in a Stroop-like paradigm. Responses were fastest when the movement direction was compatible with the word’s referent location (i.e., the location of the novel object in vertical space) during the learning phase. This finding suggests that sensorimotor experiences become associated with words during initial word learning. The results of the current study and implications for language learning are discussed.

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.

Personal pronouns belong to the most conservative parts of grammar; that is, they are diachronically fairly stable, as suggested by the fact that in many cases they can be traced back etymologically to or even beyond the earliest stages of reconstructible language history. This is why so far not much progress has been made in unraveling the genesis of personal pronouns: the number of cases where it has been possible to determine their origin is severely limited. Still, some data do exist and allow for the reconstruction of some major lines of grammatical evolution. As we hope to show in this paper, this evolution is the product of a handful of crosslinguistically fairly uniform cognitive and communicative strategies.

This paper discusses how point of view (POV) is expressed in British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English narrative discourse. Spoken languages can mark changes in POV using strategies such as direct/indirect discourse, whereas signed languages can mark changes in POV in a unique way using “role shift”. Role shift is where the signer “becomes” a referent by taking on attributes of that referent, e.g. facial expression. In this study, two native BSL users and two native British English speakers were asked to tell the story “The Tortoise and the Hare”. The data were then compared to see how point of view is expressed and maintained in both languages. The results indicated that the spoken English users preferred the narrator's perspective, whereas the BSL users preferred a character's perspective. This suggests that spoken and signed language users may structure stories in different ways. However, some co-speech gestures and facial expressions used in the spoken English stories to denote characters' thoughts and feelings bear resemblance to the hand movements and facial expressions used by the BSL storytellers. This suggests that while approaches to storytelling may differ, both languages share some gestural resources which manifest themselves in different ways across different modalities.

Michael Arbib's book proposes a scenario of language evolution that begins with pantomime, progresses to proto-sign, and then develops together with proto-speech in an “expanding spiral” to create a language-ready brain. The richness of detail in Arbib's hypothesis makes serious appraisal of each of its aspects possible. Here I describe findings about established and emerging sign languages that bear specifically upon the interaction between sign and speech proposed in the Mirror System Hypothesis. While supporting the central role that Arbib attributes to gestural/visual communication in understanding language and its evolution, I point out some kinks in the spiral that potentially disrupt its smooth expansion. One is the fact that each modality relies on an entirely different motor system. Another is the type of relation that holds between the articulators and grammatical structure, which is radically different in each system as well. A third kink disrupts the proposed continuity between holistic pantomime (gestural holophrases) and signs. Given such differences, instead of a scenario in which speech grew out of sign, it seems more likely that the two modalities complemented each other symbiotically throughout evolution as they do today. If so, then the modern ability to spontaneously create sign languages reveals the extraordinary richness and plasticity of human cognition, and not an evolutionary stepping stone to speech.

‘Special reduction’ refers to instances of extreme phonetic reduction which is restricted to particular words or phrases, usually grammaticalizing constructions (going to > [gə̃ɾ̃ə̃]), greetings (hi from how are you), discourse markers (Spanish o sea > sa), or other sequences that are often used together. On the basis of data from English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Colombian Spanish, we argue that special reduction is based on the general phonetic tendencies in the language, but that these tendencies are carried to an extreme where word sequences are used with high frequency and become chunked, allowing formerly stressed syllables to lose stress and reduce. The data also show that special reduction takes place gradually over time, and reflects general patterns of change seen in the history of the language. In fact, in some examples, special reduction presages more general sound changes that occur later. We argue that the gradual phonetic changes that accumulate for particular words or phrases, eventually changing them dramatically, requires an exemplar model for the phonological representation of words and phrases, which is updated continually as sequences are used and affected by reductive phonetic processes.

Grammatical constructions are typically partially but not fully productive, which leads to a conundrum for the learner. When can a construction be extended for use with new words and when can it not? The solution suggested here relies on two complementary processes. The first is dynamic categorization: as learners record the statistics of their language, they implicitly categorize the input on the basis of form and function. On the basis of this categorization process, general semantic and phonological constraints on productivity emerge, and productivity is to a large extent determined by the degree to which the category is well attested by similar exemplars. Occasionally, a semantically sensical and phonologically well-formed instance of a well-attested construction is simply not fully acceptable. It is suggested that a process of statistical preemption is at work in these cases: learners avoid using a construction if an alternative formulation has been systematically witnessed instead. The mechanism proposed for statistical preemption is competition-driven learning: when two competitors are activated but one reliably wins, the loser becomes less accessible over time. In this way, the paradox of partial productivity can be resolved.

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.