As word formation can be conceptualized as an act of creativity with considerable space for differences among speakers, we present pilot research aimed at the examination of the role of Big-Five personality domains in the formation of new complex words. The sample consisted of 197 participants who underwent a word formation test and a personality assessment via The Next Big-Five Inventory. The results indicate that when ordinal regression is conducted with an aim of accounting for age and gender, open-mindedness is shown as a potentially important predictor – it positively predicted economy of expression and negatively predicted semantic transparency. Furthermore, a more nuanced approach differentiating three facets of open-mindedness shows that creative imagination predicted semantic transparency positively while esthetic sensitivity predicts semantic transparency negatively (the reverse is true for the economy of expression). These findings provide a promising starting point for future research.

Abstract domains of knowledge may have social origins. However, whether abstract concepts (ACs) may also differentially affect communicative interaction and conversation has not been explored. Here, we studied ACs’ communicative functions by collecting in an Italian and an English sample, ratings for concrete concept (CC) and ACs related to three main dimensions: communicative/pragmatic [i.e., Openness to Negotiation (ON), Easiness to Start a Conversation (ESC)], semantic/metacognitive [i.e., Social Metacognition (SM) – perceived need of others, Word Confidence (WC), Contextual Availability (CA)], and emotional–experiential (i.e., Pleasantness, Valence, Familiarity). Overall, Italian participants judged it was easier to start a conversation, the more pleasant, familiar, and positively valenced were rated the concepts. Crucially, at lower values of the emotional–experiential component (i.e., Familiarity in the Italian sample, also Pleasantness and Valence in an English sample), there was an advantage of ACs over CCs in the ESC. Moreover, in the Italian sample, participants rated ACs higher on SM, ON, and lower on WC and CA. Notably, in both the Italian and English sample, ACs with higher ratings on the ESC dimension belonged to the Self-Sociality subcluster. The results offer new insights into the pragmatic aspects linked to ACs’ use.

Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential order for an under-studied type of construction: German verb–object metaphors. In two visual-world, eye-tracking experiments, we manipulated whether a discourse context biased a spoken target utterance toward a metaphoric or a literal interpretation. We also manipulated the order of verb and object in the target utterances (e.g., Stefan interviewt eine Hyäne, ‘Stefan interviews a hyena’, verb→object; and Stefan wird eine Hyäne interviewen, ‘Stefan will a hyena interview’, object→verb). Experiment 1 shows that contextual cues interacted with sequential order, mediating the processing of verb–object metaphors: When the context biased toward a metaphoric interpretation, participants readily understood the object metaphorically for the verb→object sequence, whereas they likely first understood it literally for the object→verb sequence. Crucially, no such effect of sequential order was found when context biased toward a literal interpretation. Experiment 2 suggests that differences in processing found in Experiment 1 were brought on by the interaction of discourse context and sequential order and not by sequential order alone. We propose ways in which existing theoretical views could be extended to account for these findings. Overall, our study shows the importance of context during figurative language comprehension and highlights the need to test the predictions of metaphor theories on non-English and non-nominal metaphors.

Talmy’s motion event typology has served as a fruitful framework for exploring bilingual cognition and language use. The present study extends this line of research to the bilingualism situation of an underrepresented Turkic language, i.e., Modern Uyghur, and Mandarin Chinese, and it does so by focusing on a relatively understudied type of motion, i.e., caused motion. The two languages are genetically and typologically distinct, and yet they share verb-framing as an important lexicalization pattern in encoding motion. This study, therefore, investigated whether and to what extent this structural overlap contributes to crosslinguistic influence in Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion. Thirty Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ verbalizations were analyzed with respect to the number of semantic components expressed and the way they were syntactically packaged. Results were compared with relevant monolingual data, which showed that Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals displayed a strong L1 to L2 influence in syntactic packaging by overusing the verb-framed strategy in Mandarin Chinese. However, further comparisons with previous research on Uyghur–Chinese child and adult bilinguals’ motion construal revealed that, while structural overlap is a key factor motivating crosslinguistic influence, a coherent explanation of this phenomenon must consider more general principles of bilingual language processing and use.

There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

We often refer to space when we talk about time. To support this, studies show that we tend to associate the past with the left and the future with the right, space. However, there is little research that compares the spatial mapping of individual time units within the same methodological framework. Here, we used the same line-bisection paradigm to study horizontal spatial biases in various individual time units (i.e., hours, days, and months). Fifty-four adults processed temporal words and indicated their location on a horizontal line representing a time interval via a mouse click. Each word corresponded to one of the three conditions: left, right, or central position on the line. Our results show a reaction-time facilitation effect for hour and day units in congruent conditions (e.g., left semantic bias + left position on the line). Also, processing hour units shifted the response coordinates in the direction of the presumed spatial bias. Finally, the congruent combination of visual and semantic biases led to a shift in manual responses in the corresponding direction for all time units. We conclude that while left-to-right mapping of time concepts is relatively universal, the horizontal mapping is stronger for hours as compared with days and months.

While eating is universally salient, food habits vary greatly even across similar western cultural groups. Italians, for example, are renowned pasta consumers whereas this habit is less pervasive in other western cultures. This variability might shape the conceptualization of food of different cultural groups. Against this backdrop, it has been proposed the semantic representation of food is universally organized along two main axes, with natural food (e.g., vegetables, fruit) relying more on sensory properties and manufactured food (e.g., pasta) relying more on functional properties. In this exploratory study, we compared the semantic representation of pasta, vegetables, and fruit across Italian and English-speaking participants with a free-listing task. We find the representation of pasta is not restricted to functional properties. Moreover, Italian and English speakers differed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their representation of pasta. Italians produced more exemplars of pasta than English-speaking participants, and their conceptual organization of pasta also included fine-grained distinctions (e.g., egg-based vs. flour-and-water pasta), whereas English-speaking participants mostly focused on perceptual components (e.g., long) – even when accounting for differential consumption, cooking, and preparation experience of pasta. Our results suggest that culture-specific experiences can shape the conceptualization of food.

Words used to describe emotion are influenced by experience, context and culture; nevertheless, research studies often constrain participant response options. We explored the influence of response options on how people conceptualise emotion words in two cross-sectional studies. In Study 1 participants rated the degree to which a large set of emotion words (n = 497) fit five basic emotion categories – Happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful, Neutral. Twenty-four words that fit well within these categories were included in Study 2. In Study 2 response options were expanded to include two additional basic emotions (Disgust, Joy), and six complex emotions (Amusement, Anxiety, Contentment, Irritated, Pride, Relief). Only half of the Study 1 words were categorised into the same emotion categories in Study 2. An increase in diversity of ratings for both positive and negative valenced words suggested overlaps in people’s conceptualisations of emotion words. Results suggest potential benefits of providing research participants complex emotion categories of varying intensity, which may better reflect people’s nuanced conceptualisations of emotion. Future research exploring varied response options may provide further insight into how people categorise and differentiate emotion words.

This study explored the flexibility of the orthographic processing at parafoveal level by manipulating the relationship between flankers and targets in two lexical decision tasks. In the first, we presented the following flankers: (1) the same words as targets (farola farola farola); (2) targets with transposed non-adjacent letters (falora farola falora); (3) the targets with one different letter (fapola farola fapola); and (4) unrelated pseudowords as control stimuli (pilata farola pilata). The results show significant facilitatory effects for all three experimental conditions in comparison to the Unrelated one, as well as differences between the Transposed and One Different Letter when compared to the Identity condition. In the second experiment, the procedure was the same but with the following modifications: the transposed non-adjacent letters were vowels instead of consonants (forala farola forala), and we also presented a condition in which both vowels and consonants were transposed (folara farola folara). The results of the response latencies showed that all the experimental conditions generated facilitatory effects in comparison to the Unrelated condition, with no differences between them, although the analyses of the error rates additionally showed significant differences between the Identity and the Transposed and Vowel and Consonant Transposed conditions. These two experiments are interpreted in terms of a highly flexible orthographic processing of flankers at parafoveal level, both in relation to letter ordering and letter identification.

A common feature of discourse coherence is hierarchical organization: more generally, central relations (characterizing the overall topic or goal) dominate complementary or modifying relations. In this hierarchy, higher levels tend to be marked by stronger prosodic cues than lower levels. This study seeks to understand how such a system emerges in human communication – what is present at the outset, and what takes time to develop. Specifically, we investigate whether the conceptualization of hierarchical organization precedes overt linguistic structuring, and whether distinct types and strengths of prosodic marking at different hierarchical levels can be discerned in the process of emergence. The only empirical evidence for such an investigation comes from sign languages, because they can arise de novo at any time. Sign languages offer the additional advantage of directly linking instantiations of linguistic structure to articulations of different visually perceived bodily articulators. Our study of a young sign language, Israeli Sign Language (ISL), finds that conceptual hierarchical structuring of discourse arises very early. However, the organization of bodily articulators to linguistically mark hierarchical information takes time to emerge: Younger ISL signers use smaller, less salient articulators at lower levels of the hierarchy compared to older signers.

Languages differ considerably in the way they encode motion. Previous research on motion encoding has paid much attention to inter-typological variation (i.e., variation between language types) and intra-typological variation (i.e., variation within language types), but less focus on intra-linguistic variation (i.e., variation within particular languages). To fill this niche, the current study compares actual motion and metaphorical motion in Standard Mandarin Chinese with a corpus-based approach. We ask whether the typological properties in actual motion extend to metaphorical motion. The results indicate that the answer is negative. The typological properties including lexicalization patterns and the distribution of semantic components vary by both event type (actual motion vs. metaphorical motion) and genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) within Chinese. The intra-linguistic variation can be explained by additional factors – the pragmatic context and the structural property of Chinese. These findings support a constructional proposal of the motion event typology, which is a more nuanced typology that expands the binary distinction between V-languages and S-languages. In this proposal, the consideration of the scalar dimension enables more explicit descriptions of variation within languages (shift left- or rightward on the scale) and more accurate explanations for these phenomena.

While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in the lexicon of spoken languages, its presence in grammatical structures is poorly understood. This study investigates the presence of vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems by collecting nominal classification devices from the two main system types: 210 non-agreeing languages (126 families) and 151 agreeing languages (123 families). To detect overrepresentations of sound types in class meanings, the nominal classification devices were grouped according to comparable semantic categories, transcribed using comparable phonetic system, and analyzed through Bayesian mixed models. The strongest results were found for associations between nominal classification devices denoting flat and low, front, unrounded vowels, along with several weak associations relating to shape/size/quantity, function, humanness/animacy, and sex. These associations mostly correlate with previous vocal iconicity findings, but crucially, the involved nominal classification devices are mostly semantically typical for non-agreeing, for example, classifier, systems. These findings were attributed to structural differences between nominal classification system types, which result from grammaticalization processes, for example, phonetic erosion and semantic bleaching. Thus, increased formal predictability through grammatical agreement comes at a cost of semantic transparency which, in turn, dismantles the semantic prerequisites needed for vocal iconic associations to be operational.

Children’s processing and comprehension of metonymy have received little attention in the developmental literature, which has mainly focused on children’s acquisition of metaphor abilities. However, it has been found that metonymy production and comprehension precede metaphor production and comprehension (Falkum et al., 2017; Nerlich et al., 1999; Pérez-Hernández & Duvignau, 2016; Runblad & Annaz, 2010). Nerlich et al. (1999) suggest that metonymic relations are exploited in overextensions produced by children up to age 2;5 and call these “compelled metonymic overextensions”. At this very early age, a child’s vocabulary is still relatively small, and this compels them to extend already known words to cope with their increasing communicative needs. These overextensions are, however, in most cases not random, as some type of associative relation (e.g., cause–effect, object–act, container–content, etc.) between the concepts referred to can be identified. This study focuses on the metonymic relations exploited by 18 Afrikaans-speaking infants and toddlers (between the ages of 0;6 and 2;0) in their early overextensions. The metonymic relations as described by Norrick (1981) as well as Radden and Kövecses (1999) are employed in the analysis. A total of 207 out of 1371 one-word utterances were identified as compelled metonymic overextensions and 11 types of metonymic relations could be identified as underlying these utterances. This study illustrates that the metonymic relations identified in such young children’s early language provide insight and understanding into how they categorise and associate various concepts with each other.

Extensive evidence has demonstrated that bilinguals non-selectively activate lexicons of both languages when reading or hearing words in one language. Here, we further investigated the electrophysiological roles of cross-linguistic orthography and phonology in the processing of L2 spoken words in unbalanced Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in a cross-modal situation. Relative to unrelated control, the recognition of auditory L2 words showed behavioral interference effects when paired with orthographic or phonological neighbors of the correct translations of L2 words. Moreover, the lexical effects were also exhibited in the electrophysiological data, as reflected by marginally less positive late positive component (500–800 ms) amplitudes in the frontal region. Importantly, the orthographic rather than phonological translation neighbor condition elicited less negative N400 (300–500 ms) amplitudes in the parietal–occipital regions, suggesting that this orthographic translation neighbor condition facilitated the co-activation of spoken L2 words. Taken together, these findings indicate that cross-linguistic orthographic and phonological activation have different temporal dynamics with both bottom-up parallel cross-linguistic activation and the top-down inhibitory control mechanism governing the two-language lexical organization in L2 spoken word recognition.

Switching between two concurrent tasks is an important ability of the mind. In a series of two experiments, we explored the role of activation (arousal and subjective significance) and emotional valence in shaping the effectiveness of switching between two cognitive tasks: gender-marking and emotional categorisations of verbal stimuli. We expected arousal to disrupt and subjective significance to boost the effectiveness of cognitive switching. We employed a paradigm that allowed us to present emotional words and measure the reaction latencies when a task given to the participants was switched; thus, the response was more costly than when continuing to respond to the same task. The first experiment, conducted with neutral words, showed that high subjective significance reduced reaction latencies in comparison with medium subjective significance. The second experiment showed a similar pattern only for neutral stimuli in the emotional categorisation task, but not for negative and positive stimuli. We did not find a clear effect of arousal or valence. The results of our studies suggest that subjective significance is independent of arousal in enhancing the cognitive control resources.

In masked priming lexical decision tasks in alphabetic or syllabic script languages, latencies are longer when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue–BLUR) than when primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care–BLUR) – an “inhibitory neighbor priming effect.” In contrast, Zhou et al. (1999) demonstrated facilitatory orthographic neighbor priming for two-character Chinese words (e.g., 华丽–华贵). However, Zhou et al. did not control for relative prime-target frequency, which has been shown to be important in experiments when examining languages with other scripts. In the present Experiment 1 word neighbor primes (e.g., 容易-容貌) produced an inhibitory neighbor priming effect when the prime was higher frequency than the target, paralleling effects in other script languages. In further experiments, paralleling those in other script languages, two-character targets primed by nonword neighbors (容待-容貌) or single constituent characters matching the target in either position (容-容貌) showed significant facilitation. These results suggest that lexical activation/competition processes for two-character Chinese words are reasonably similar to those for words in alphabetic/syllabic script languages.

Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of iconicity is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We collected iconicity measures for 304 Japanese words from English-speaking participants, using rating and guessing tasks. The words included ideophones (structurally marked depictive words) along with regular lexical items from similar semantic domains (e.g., fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’). The two measures correlated, speaking to their validity. However, ideophones received consistently higher iconicity ratings than other items, even when guessed at the same accuracies, suggesting the rating task is more sensitive to cues like structural markedness that frame words as iconic. These cues did not always guide participants to the meanings of ideophones in the guessing task, but they did make them more confident in their guesses, even when they were wrong. Consistently poor guessing results reflect the role different experiences play in shaping construals of iconicity. Using multiple measures in tandem allows us to explore the interplay between iconicity and these external factors. To facilitate this, we introduce a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing tasks from standardised wordlists, while also making improvements to the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches.

Previous studies have brought conflicting results regarding the effects of valence and arousal in visual word processing. Some authors have pointed to participants’ individual differences as one of the possible explanations for these inconsistencies. The main aim of the present research was to examine whether participants’ individual differences in the level of epistemically unwarranted beliefs (EUB) contribute to these conflicting results. Therefore, participants who varied in their level of paranormal, pseudoscientific and conspiracy beliefs (assessed by self-report measures) performed a lexical decision task (LDT) and a recognition memory task. Linear mixed-effects models over LDT response times revealed that the effects of words’ emotional content (both valence and arousal) were modulated by the degree of individuals’ EUB. In addition, signal detection theory analyses showed that in the recognition task (but not in the LDT) response bias became more liberal as individuals’ EUB increased. These patterns of effects were not general to all EUB instances. The obtained results highlight the need to consider participants’ individual differences in affective word processing and signal detection. In addition, this study reveals some basic psychological mechanisms that would underlie EUB, a fact that has both theoretical and applied relevance.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder, characterised at the cognitive level by a phenotypic pattern of relative weaknesses (e.g., visuospatial skills) and strengths (e.g., some linguistic and nonverbal reasoning skills). In this study, we performed a systematic search and meta-analysis on lexical-semantic processing in WS, an area of knowledge in which contradictory results have been obtained. We found 42 studies matching our criteria, and, in total, 78 effect sizes were included in the meta-analysis. Results showed that individuals with WS have worse lexical-semantic skills than individuals with typical development, whether matched by chronological or mental age. However, people with WS have better lexical-semantic skills than people diagnosed with other cognitive disabilities. Finally, vocabulary skills seem to be relatively spared in WS, although they present some difficulties in semantic processing/integration, semantic memory organisation and verbal working memory skills. Taken together, these results support a neuroconstructivist approach, according to which the cognitive mechanisms involved in lexical-semantic processing may be modulated, even when performance in some tasks (i.e., vocabulary tasks) might be optimal.

The task of finding a case type that, on average, enhances the processing of verbal material has yielded mixed results in the literature. This study tackled this issue with an eye to the issue of processing textual information on road signs and the additional consideration of readers’ attentive states. Participants (n = 104) completed three experiments, the first two of which made use of both short (i.e., attentive state) and long (i.e., nonattentive or mind-wandering state) inter-trial intervals (ITIs). Experiment I consisted of a living versus non-living category-decision task involving the presentation of single words. Experiment II consisted of a sensical versus nonsensical sentence-judgment task. Experiment III consisted of a recognition memory task for words presented during the category-decision task. No significant difference in letter-case-type effectiveness was found for either the semantic categorization of or memory for single words. On the other hand, sensical sentences were correctly judged more quickly in lower case (or, more precisely, sentence case with the first letter of the first word capitalized). Such results point to either a more fluent processing of or enhanced conceptual resonance for sentences presented in lower case.