Motor theories of perception posit that motor information is necessary for successful recognition of actions. Perhaps the most well known of this class of proposals is the motor theory of speech perception, which argues that speech recognition is fundamentally a process of identifying the articulatory gestures (i.e. motor representations) that were used to produce the speech signal. Here we review neuropsychological evidence from patients with damage to the motor system, in the context of motor theories of perception applied to both manual actions and speech. Motor theories of perception predict that patients with motor impairments will have impairments for action recognition. Contrary to that prediction, the available neuropsychological evidence indicates that recognition can be spared despite profound impairments to production. These data falsify strong forms of the motor theory of perception, and frame new questions about the dynamical interactions that govern how information is exchanged between input and output systems.

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.

As one of the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Amis exhibits abundant lexical items for describing odors. This paper investigates the lexical representations of olfaction across the Amis dialects, showing that Amis possesses more than a dozen abstract odor terms, and uses the proclitic hala=/hali=/ha= plus reduplication of a noun as the source-oriented construction for manifesting olfactory perception. This study also incorporates controlled elicitation by using the booklet of ‘The Smell Identification Test™’ to elicit spontaneous descriptions for the perceived odors. The methodology provides further information to shed light on the categories of verbal responses for odors and the degree of perceptual consistency based on culturally dependent experiences.

We demonstrate how a particular type of knowledge about objects, their spatial locations and thus how to direct actions toward them, contributes to the comprehension of language about those objects. In four experiments, participants judged if sentences were about normal objects (e.g., “The apple has a stem”) or odd objects (e.g., “The apple has an antenna”). The Normal response key was either on the left of a response box or on the right. The named objects were themselves either on the left or the right of the response box. We demonstrate a compatibility effect in which responding Normal to the side where the object was located was faster than responding Normal to the opposite side. Furthermore, this effect was equally strong for sentences describing states of the objects (as above) and sentences describing actions (e.g., “Touch the apple at the stem”); the compatibility effect was found when the objects were removed; the effect required compatibility between actions, not just spatial locations; and the effect was found in both English and German. The results are discussed in relation to how action systems are used in language comprehension.

This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the ‘she answered nothing’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types.

In this study, two modalities of expression (verbal and visual) are compared and contrasted, in relation to their ability and their limitations to construct and express metaphors. A representative set of visual metaphors and a representative set of linguistic metaphors are here compared, and the semantic similarity between metaphor terms is modeled within the two sets. Such similarity is operationalized in terms of semantic features produced by informants in a property generation task (e.g., McRae et al., 2005). Semantic features provide insights into conceptual content, and play a role in deep conceptual processing, as opposed to shallow linguistic processing. Thus, semantic features appear to be useful for modeling metaphor comprehension, assuming that metaphors are matters of thought rather than simple figures of speech (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The question tackled in this paper is whether semantic features can account for the similarity between metaphor terms of both visual and verbal metaphors. For this purpose, a database of semantic features was collected and then used to analyze fifty visual metaphors and fifty verbal metaphors. It was found that the number of semantic features shared between metaphor terms is predicted by the modality of expression of the metaphor: the terms compared in visual metaphors share semantic features, while the terms compared in verbal metaphors do not. This suggests that the two modalities of expression afford different ways to construct and express metaphors.

Words like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’, and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form–meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this association. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity that covary with funniness and iconicity ratings and that, we propose, serve as metacommunicative signals to draw attention to words as playful and performative. To assess the generalisability of the findings we develop a method to estimate lexical ratings from distributional semantics and apply it to a dataset 20 times the size of the original set of human ratings. The method can be used more generally to extend coverage of lexical ratings. We find that it reliably reproduces correlations between funniness and iconicity as well as cues of structural markedness, though it also amplifies biases present in the human ratings. Our study shows that the playful and the poetic are part of the very texture of the lexicon.

In this book it has been proposed that the mirror system can be a scaffold for building a language-ready brain, because of its property of matching action observation with action execution, a feature that can correspond to the “parity” requirement for communication. In this commentary we will first emphasize two properties of mirror neurons and motor cortex that may have contributed to language: the generalization of the property of understanding action goals and the capacity to decode the goal of action sequences. Then we will propose, based on recent behavioural and neurophysiological data in monkeys, that the vocalization in non-human primates could have reached a partial voluntary control, thus contributing to the emergence of a communicative system relying on the coordination of gestures and utterances.

The present article responds to commentaries from experts in anthropology, apraxia, archeology, linguistics, neuroanatomy, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, primatology, sign language emergence and sign language neurolinguistics on the book How the brain got language: The mirror system hypothesis (Arbib 2012). The role of complex imitation is discussed, and the distinction between protolanguage and language is emphasized. Issues debated include the role of protosign in scaffolding protospeech, the interplay between biological evolution of the brain and cultural evolution of the social interactions within groups, the relations brain mechanisms for action and language, and the question of when language first emerged.

Individuals differ in how frequently they gesture. It is not clear whether gesture frequency is related to culture, since varied results have been reported. The purpose of this study was to test whether the frequency of representational gestures is linked with story-telling style. Previous research showed individual and cross-cultural differences in story-telling style, some preferring to tell a chronicle (how it happened) or an evaluative story (why it happened). We hypothesized that high gesture frequency might be strongly associated with using a chronicle style, since both rely on visuospatial imagery. Four groups of bilinguals, English as their second language (L2) participated. Their first language (L1) was one of: Mandarin, Hindi, French, or Spanish. Participants watched a cartoon and told the story, once in English, once in L1. The results showed group differences in the rate of gesture use: the Chinese and Hindi L1 participants gestured less frequently than the French and Spanish L1 participants. The participants from Asian cultures were more likely to tell an evaluative story and the Romance-language L1 participants a chronicle. We conclude that these culture/language groups differ in story-telling style. A chronicle style is associated with more gesture production than an evaluative style.

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages.

The sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual phonemes or phoneme features best accounted for iconicity effects. We tested 92 participants’ judgements about the appropriateness of 320 nonwords presented in written form, relating to 8 different semantic attributes. For all 8 attributes, individual phonemes fitted participants’ responses better than general phoneme features. These results challenge claims that sound-symbolic effects for visually presented words can access broad, cross-modal associations between sound and meaning, instead the results indicate the operation of individual phoneme to meaning relations. Whether similar effects are found for nonwords presented auditorially remains an open question.

In recent years proponents of usage-based linguistics have singled out ‘categorization’ as possibly the fundamental cognitive operation underlying the acquisition and use of language. Despite this increasing appeal to the importance of categorization, few researchers have yet offered explicit interpretations of how linguistic categories might be represented in the brain other than vague allusions to prototype theory, especially as implemented in connectionist-like frameworks. In this paper, I discuss in some detail the implications of superimposing the theoretical representations of linguistic structures onto domain-general models of categorization. I first review the evidence that instance-based, or exemplar-based, models of categorization provide empirically and theoretically better models of both domain-general categorization and of linguistic categorization than do the most commonly cited alternative models. I then argue that of the three exemplar-based models currently being applied to linguistic data, Skousen’s Analogical Model (AM) appears to provide the simplest, most straightforward account of the data and that it appears to be fully compatible with our current understanding of the psychological capabilities and operations that underlie categorization behavior.

Studies on gaze allocation during sentence production have recently begun to implement cross-linguistic analyses in the investigation of visual and linguistic processing. The underlying assumption is that the aspects of a scene that attract attention prior to articulation are, in part, linked to the specific linguistic system and means used for expression. The present study concerns naturalistic, dynamic scenes (video clips) showing causative events (agent acting on an object) and exploits grammatical differences in the domain of verbal aspect, and the way in which the status of an event (a specific vs. habitual instance of an event) is encoded in English and German. Fixations in agent and action areas of interest were timelocked to utterance onset, and we focused on the pre-articulatory time span to shed light on sentence planning processes, involving message generation and scene conceptualization. Findings are threefold: (i) English speakers mark the status of an event as specific in relation to the action, with progressive aspect marking on the verb in each utterance. German speakers do so by elaborating specific characteristics of the agent; (ii) participants display significantly different gaze allocation patterns to agent and action regions although the sentences produced in both languages follow the same subject−verb word order; and (iii) the analysis of gaze patterns during sentence production given dynamic scenes provide complementary results from a more naturalistic paradigm, to those obtained in studies with still images.

Expressives like damn convey a negative attitude toward an entity or toward a situation. What is particularly interesting about such expressions is the looseness of the relation between their syntax, which is the syntax of normal attribute adjectives, and their interpretation (Potts 2005, 2007). An experiment on various negative expressives manipulated the placement of the expressive as a prior utterance, or inside the subject or inside an object of the verb or preposition. Experimental participants were asked what the speaker was most likely to have a negative attitude towards − the subject, the object, or the entire situation. The test items were of two types, ‘non-causal’ and ‘causal’, exemplified by The holiday is on the damn weekend and The dog is on the damn couch. In the non-causal items, the subject (holiday) cannot plausibly be taken as being responsible for the state of affairs described. However, in the causal items, the subject might be responsible for the state of affairs described. The same range of interpretations was observed for all placements of damn. The prior utterance condition (Damn. The dog is on the couch.) yielded more entire situation interpretations than the sentence-internal damn items. Overall, subject damn items yielded more subject interpretations than object damn items. However, as predicted by the hypothesis that blame would devolve on a potentially responsible agent (the culprit hypothesis), there were more subject interpretations in the causal items than in the non-causal items. The results suggest that considerable pragmatic inferencing is involved in the interpretation of expressives, consistent with a proposal that an expressive constitutes a separate speech act.

This paper proposes a gradient redefinition of the notion of factuality, here intended as a dynamic continuum unfolding through several epistemic levels. In this respect, the speaker/writer’s increasing certainty upon the realization of an event or situation is here as factualization. Factualization is a conceptual phenomenon determined by an embodied mechanism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1987, 2003; Grush, 2004; Gallese & Lakoff, 2005) of cyclic acquisition and control with respect to a new proposition P. Being a form of subjectification (Traugott, 1989, 1995, 2003, 2010, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002), factualization occurs as the semasiological reanalysis of an epistemic construction. Drawing on Langacker’s (1991, 2008, 2009) notion of the ‘epistemic control cycle’ (see also Kan, Teubner-Rhodes, Drummey, Nutile, Krupa, & Novick, 2013, on cognitive control), I claim and demonstrate that epistemic predicates originally conveying weak certainty towards a proposition P diachronically develop an increasingly factual meaning conveying more and more frequently a subjected form of certainty. This phenomenon is first shown through a qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis from the BNC,1 which provides a measurable account of the various degrees of polysemy of the three epistemic predicates I think, I believe, and I reckon. In addition, I discuss the results of a diachronic corpus survey from the diaCoris on the factualization process of (Io) penso ‘I think’ in Modern Italian during the last 150 years, showing how the contemporary usage of (Io) penso is notably more oriented towards absolute factuality than it was 150 years earlier.

Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative efficiency, i.e., an efficient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative efficiency hypothesis by investigating speakers’ preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we find that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative efficiency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specific to Yucatec. We find that Yucatec speakers’ preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specific realizations.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a severe mental health problem of a heterogeneous nature. To add to discussions around defining coherent subtypes of OCD, this paper uses qualitative, cognitive linguistic analysis to show how episodes of OCD can be differentiated based on their underlying conceptualizations of threat. Spoken narratives of OCD episodes told by people with OCD were analyzed using image schema theory and cognitive approaches to deixis in discourse. Through an exploration of the participants’ subjective experiences of time, space, and uncertainty in their recounted OCD episodes, the findings demonstrate that perceptions of threats fluctuate as OCD episodes unfold, and that it is the perceived movement (or not) of the threat that induces distress. Moreover, the dynamism of the threat is conceptualized differently for different subtypes of OCD. This variation can in part be explained by the role of two image schemas in structuring OCD episodes: the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL image schema and the CONTAINER image schema. It is argued that the blanket notion of threat as often investigated in clinical models of OCD is not sensitive enough to capture these shifting perspectives. It is thus recommended that threat perception in OCD is researched as a dynamic, evolving, and highly subjective experience.

Speakers of the world’s languages differ in the ways they talk about directed motion. Speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-languages; e.g., English) typically conflate Path and Manner in a single clause (e.g., run out), whereas speakers of verb-framed languages (V-languages; e.g., Spanish) tend to convey Path and Manner in two different clauses (e.g., salir corriendo ‘exit running’). Herein, we ask whether speakers also show systematic variability within particular languages and language types in their directed motion descriptions. We examine this question by comparing oral narratives of adult native speakers of one V-language (Spanish) and two S-languages (German, Polish) (N = 15), where each subject provided a simultaneous description of an ongoing animated video depicting self- (e.g., jump into the river) and caused-motion (e.g., throw a stone into the river) events. Our results showed strong evidence for both intra-typological and language-internal variability, especially in the extent to which the Manner component is encoded. Overall, the locus of Path encoding (e.g., verb, prefix, particle) and the conceptual structure of motion events (i.e., self-motion, caused-motion) were two key factors that influenced the speakers’ choice of lexicalization pattern. We discuss the implications of our findings, which (i) suggest a more nuanced typology of motion events that expands the binary distinction between V- vs. S-languages – in line with earlier work on intra-typological variability, and (ii) highlight the relevance of such a nuanced typology for motion cognition.

Inference has long been acknowledged as a key aspect of comprehending narratives of all kinds, be they verbal discourse or visual narratives like comics and films. While both theoretical and empirical evidence points towards such inference generation in sequential images, most of these approaches remain at a fairly broad level. Few approaches have detailed the specific cues and constructions used to signal such inferences in the first place. This paper thereby outlines several specific entrenched constructions that motivate a reader to generate inference. These techniques include connections motivated by the morphology of visual affixes like speech balloons and thought bubbles, the omission of certain narrative categories, and the substitution of narrative categories for certain classes of panels. These mechanisms all invoke specific combinatorial structures (morphology, narrative) that mismatch with the elicited semantics, and can be generalized by a set of shared descriptive features. By detailing specific constructions, this paper aims to push the study of inference in visual narratives to be explicit about when and why meaning is ‘filled in’ by a reader, while drawing connections to inference generation in other modalities.