Memory for emotional information is greater than for non-emotional information and is enhanced by sleep-related consolidation. Previous studies have focused on emotional arousal and valence of established stimuli, but what is the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotional information? Figurative expressions, which are pervasive in everyday communication, are often rated as higher in emotionality than their literal counterparts, but the effect of emotionality on the learning of metaphors, and the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotionally negative, positive and neutral language, is as yet poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to memorise conventional (e.g. ‘sunny disposition’) and novel (e.g. ‘cloudy disposition’) metaphorical word pairs varying in valence, accompanied by their definitions. After a 12-hour period of sleep or wake, participants were tested on their recognition of word pairs and recall of definitions. We found higher arousal ratings were related to increased recognition and recall performance. Furthermore, sleep increased the accurate recognition of all word pairs compared to wake but also reduced the valence of word pairs. The results indicate better memory for newly acquired emotional stimuli, a benefit of sleep for memory, but also a reduction in emotional arousal as a consequence of sleep consolidation.

In grammaticalization studies, reanalysis is understood as the assignment of new meaning to formally unchanged elements, supported by bridging contexts compatible with the old and the reanalyzed meaning. The source determination hypothesis (SDH) predicts that parallel grammaticalization trajectories occur crosslinguistically, as similar source meanings give rise to similar inferences. One such pattern is the development of recent past markers from FINISH constructions. While grammaticalization pathways are well-documented crosslinguistically, the SDH has never been tested experimentally. In this study, we examine whether modern English speakers are sensitive to inferences arising from a bridging context identified as relevant to the grammaticalization of Old Spanish FINISH into a recent past marker. In a temporal distance judgment task, we examined whether the bridging context identified for Old Spanish facilitates an inference of temporal immediacy in contemporary English, where the construction has not been grammaticalized. In line with the SDH, the bridging context enhanced an inference of immediacy in contemporary English (Exp. 1), with specific grammatical features of the source determining its strength (Exp. 2). These results not only demonstrate the viability of testing hypotheses about language change using experimental pragmatics but also call for empirically refining the concept of source determination.

This experimental study explored how adopting a deceptive stance affects linguistic processes during real-time production of multi-sentence texts in speaking and writing. Language production involves planning, monitoring and editing – processes that give rise to and are shaped by fluctuations in processing demands. Deception is assumed to influence these processes as speakers and writers manage competing communicative goals: to be coherent while concealing the truth. Narratives were elicited by asking participants to account for events from four short films: two truthful and two deceitful, in both speaking and writing. In speaking, deception decreased the total number of pauses, but in longer deceptive texts, pausing instead increased, suggesting adaptive adjustments to regulate overt cues to lying. In writing, deception decreased text revisions and altered pause behaviour, suggesting that writers modified their production patterns when altering information. Together, these findings suggest that deceptive language production involves shifts in planning, monitoring and editing processes that manifest differently across modalities: while speech shows suppression of pauses, writing reveals subtle changes in revision and pausing behaviour. These results highlight modality-specific signatures of deception and demonstrate how speakers and writers dynamically adapt their language production processes to align with communicative intent.

The use of metaphors, whether linguistic or visual, has been shown to enhance advertisement effectiveness, and sensory marketing research highlights the positive effects of appealing to consumers’ sensory perception. Synaesthetic metaphors, which involve metaphor and sensory experiences, are ideal for studying the effects of both metaphor and (multi)sensory cues in advertisements. We experimentally tested the hypothesis that the presence of (linguistic and/or visual) metaphor and the evocation of multiple senses will enhance advertisement appreciation and the intention to purchase the advertised product. We manipulated eight print advertisements, each of which was presented in the following conditions: (1) visual and linguistic synaesthetic metaphor; (2) linguistic but no visual synaesthetic metaphor; (3) visual but no linguistic synaesthetic metaphor; and (4) neither visual nor linguistic synaesthetic metaphor. Each advertisement was also rated for its multisensoriality, that is, its association with the five basic senses. Results partly supported the hypothesis, showing that advertisements with both visual and linguistic synaesthetic metaphors and those perceived as more multisensory were most appreciated. However, purchase intentions were not influenced by either metaphor or multisensoriality. This indicates that higher aesthetic appreciation does not necessarily translate into higher purchase intentions, suggesting the need for further research into additional influencing factors.

Studies on bilingual individuals indicate that both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) processing recruit linguistic and simulation systems, with L1 processing typically showing greater activation of simulation systems (often referred to as preference systems) and L2 processing relying more heavily on linguistic systems. When bilingual speakers switch between languages, the language used initially may influence the activation of preference systems in the subsequent language. The present study examines whether L2 proficiency moderates this influence. Employing a 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design, we investigated how L2 proficiency shapes embodied effects during L1 and L2 sentence comprehension under two language-switching conditions (L1 → L2 and L2 → L1) in bilingual participants. Results revealed that low-proficiency bilinguals demonstrated embodied effects in L1 comprehension across both switching directions. In contrast, highly proficient bilinguals showed such effects only when switching from L1 to L2 but not from L2 to L1. These findings suggest that, in the L2 → L1 condition, the linguistic system activated during L2 processing in highly proficient bilinguals exerts a stronger influence on subsequent L1 processing than in low-proficiency bilinguals, highlighting the role of proficiency in modulating cross-linguistic embodied effects.

Suspense is an important aspect of cognitive-emotional narrative text comprehension. We adopt a text-centered, linguistic approach, investigating how the information structure of a narrative text as modeled by its erotetic structure instigates suspense. We report on two studies that reveal a strong correlation between the presence of what we term ‘potentially inquiry-terminating questions’ (PITQs) and the level of experienced suspense. PITQs are binary questions that hold a unique role in the erotetic structure of a narrative: the reader perceives one possible answer to resolve a broader, pivotal plot-related question and the other answer to leave it temporarily unresolved. While previous research has proposed that information structure is a factor in deriving narrative suspense, in this paper, we show that it is the role of PITQs specifically that allows us to effectively predict suspense. Our research shows that PITQs are a linguistic notion that has a clear cognitive-emotional correlate. Thus, PITQs should receive future attention in linguistic theory, pragmatics and interdisciplinary studies. While our approach is specifically concerned with written texts, the flexibility of erotetic theories of interpretation in principle allows us to extend the scope of the present approach to any other medium of narrative presentation.

Previous research on bilingual language processing has shed light on language control mechanism behind comprehension and speech production of bilinguals but the commonness or habitualness of code-switched terms in the design of the stimuli is seldom explored. This research attempted to explore the relationship between habitualness of code-switched terms and cognitive load level in Cantonese-English sight translation tasks among native Cantonese speakers in Macao through investigation from both objective and subjective data. The research collected and analysed eye-tracking data, audio data and NASA-TLX data. The results provided partial evidence that Macao native Cantonese speakers tended to experience lower cognitive load in the sight translation task when they were allowed to code switch the words they habitually applied in English; however, the correlation between code-switching and reduction of cognitive load was not significant. The findings suggest the selectivity of code-switching in language output and indicate that different levels of habitualness of the code-switched terms may modulate cognitive load.

Scalar words such as warm may give rise to inferences such as warm but not hot. Under standard accounts, such scalar implicatures are derived by negating stronger alternatives. In processing, weaker scale-mates (warm) prime stronger ones (hot), suggesting that the latter are used in implicature processing (De Carvalho et al., 2016. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1500; Ronai & Xiang, 2023. Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, 2, 229–240). We test whether the activation of alternatives holds when no implicature is expected to arise and examine what kinds of alternatives form the basis from which scalar implicature derivation proceeds. We employ two manipulations: negation and antonymy. In line with an account derived from the theoretical treatments of implicature (e.g., Horn, 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English), negating scale-mates cancelled the activation of strong terms (hot). Contrary to these accounts, however, antonyms activated the same targets. In a joint analysis, we found that negation interacted with both scale-mate primes and antonym primes. We explain these findings within the Alternative Activation Account (Gotzner, 2017. Alternative sets in language processing: How focus alternatives are represented in the mind), which assumes an initial activation of a broad cohort of associated expressions and their subsequent grammatical and contextual narrowing.

Research on understanding the effects of language experiences upon executive control processes has turned away from static measures of language use to using more continuous measures such as proficiency, language switching and exposure. The present work utilizes language entropy, a measure that indexes the social and linguistic diversity of daily-life contexts (e.g., a classroom, cafeteria, home) of language use, to delineate the mechanisms through which contextual and social effects influence executive control. Results from existing studies utilizing entropy primarily examine bilingual contexts; however, this study focuses on multilingual university students in Ahmedabad, India. Participants (N = 56) provided entropy data from the Language History and Background Questionnaire and executive control measures from the AX-CP Task for proactive control and the n-back Task for working memory. Entropy measures proved very predictive for participants’ current language use patterns, but did not significantly predict any aspect of AX-CPT or n-back Task performance. Implications for context-specific stimulus categorization and the adaptive control hypothesis are discussed.

The sequential units of language (i.e. words) have often been characterized by a tension between diversity and universality in the triangulation between information content, length and frequency. Here we examine similar tensions in the sequential units of visual narratives (i.e. panels) by focusing on how many entities appear per panel in visual narratives from the TINTIN Corpus of 1,030 annotated comics from 144 countries (76,000+ panels). Rates of entities per panel differ in regularized ways between styles of comics that cut across global regions, implicating typologically different ‘visual languages’. Entities per panel were also associated with panel size, where greater numbers of entities were associated with larger sizes of panels. Finally, a negative association appeared between panels with different numbers of entities and their frequency, reminiscent of a Zipf’s law of abbreviation. As associations of both size and frequency with character per panel persisted in a uniform way across styles, it implies universal tendencies transcending the diversity across systems, consistent with typological properties of languages.

This study investigated how mental imagery is engaged during first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers’ incremental sentence processing of English phrasal verbs, using a self-paced sensibility judgment task interleaved with schematic diagrams. L1 speakers showed selective compatibility effects modulated by abstractness, semantic transparency of phrasal verbs, event plausibility and the timing of visual input. In contrast, L2 learners relied more generally on visual support, reflecting weaker integration of semantic and perceptual cues. Learner-internal factors such as L2 proficiency and language dominance modulated learners’ sensitivity to integrate and resolve competing cues between semantic coherence and perceptual input. These findings support a simulation-based model of L2 comprehension, highlighting the developmental nature of sensorimotor activation in bilingual processing.

In sign languages, aspects of event structure have been shown to be systematically reflected in the phonological structure of verb signs, as proposed by the Event Visibility Hypothesis (EVH). This study investigates the relationship between verb semantics and phonology in 119 verbs from Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS). Four Deaf signers evaluated the usability of these verbs in specific contexts to assess event structure, and then their responses were correlated with the phonological structure of the signs. For the majority of signs (N = 109), the semantics of event structure was reflected in their phonological form, mapping to end-state semantics as expected. For a few signs (with inchoativity), phonological forms correlated instead with event onset. Additionally, some signs allowed for argument structure alternations, which have been previously only rarely reported for sign languages. The findings support the claim that event structure is systematically mapped to verb sign phonology using physical properties of articulator motion, and further indicate the need to extend the taxonomy of event/argument structures inventory to encompass the variability across (sign) languages.

Free association (e.g., what is the first word that comes to mind when given a cue word) can reveal multiple linguistic relationships between cues and responses, even when a specific association (i.e., semantic, phonological) is intended. In this study, we investigated the influence of morphological similarity on semantic and phonological free association. Previously collected large datasets were used to evaluate morphological similarity between cues and responses in a semantic association task and a phonological association task. The results indicate that morphologically related cue–response word pairs comprised less than 2% of pairs in both association tasks. When morphologically related responses were detected in both tasks, we found more words that were non-compounds than compounds, more decomposition than composition and more suffixation than prefixation. There were task-specific differences in the psycholinguistic properties of cue words eliciting morphologically related responses. We interpret the results following a two-stage lexical model, where free association primarily involves the exploration of conceptual/lemma representations in the mental lexicon, as opposed to form/lexeme representations.

In this study, we investigate Hungarian Plain Language (PL) and Simple Language (SL) with the primary objective of training a machine-learning-based sentence-level PL model that flags sentences where expert intervention may be needed during PL-oriented rewriting. The analysis uses a legal-administrative PL corpus and a news-based SL corpus, currently the only publicly available high-quality Hungarian resources for PL and SL. In low-resource settings, PL data are typically scarce, so selective data augmentation is a natural candidate for improving model performance. Our aims are threefold: (i) to provide a feature-based descriptive comparison of these Text Simplification resources; (ii) to test whether selectively chosen SL sentences can augment PL training data; and (iii) to evaluate the impact of such augmentation on sentence-level PL detection. Methodologically, we extract handcrafted linguistic features spanning surface, morphosyntactic and discourse properties. We derive a PL-likeness score from logistic-regression coefficients and use it to select SL sentences most similar to PL for augmentation, followed by supervised sentence-level PL detection with XLM-RoBERTa-large. Results show clear differences between PL and SL in sentence length, lexical diversity, syntactic depth and connective use. Selective inclusion of SL sentences yields modest gains in constrained settings, whereas indiscriminate mixing reduces precision and reliability.

Over the last decades, there has been an increasing interest in the cognitive interaction between language and music. Previous research has focused on investigating potential underlying processes shared by the two domains. While some studies do not support such a connection when examining linguistic and music pitch, there seems to be a consensus concerning the existence of structural rule parallels, essential to the linguistic and musical adequacy. The present study focuses on the role of a non-linguistic acoustic cue, such as a high/neutral or low music pitch note, to investigate whether it affects the phrase word boundaries on garden-path sentences in Greek, leading to the elevation of garden-path effects, similarly to what has been suggested for rising intonation. Through a self-paced reading-listening experiment where word segments are accompanied by music pitch notes, our results showed significant ambiguity resolution effects for both high and low music pitch. We interpret the obtained data as an indication of an interaction between language and music, where general (random) sound signals may facilitate linguistic processing.

The objective of this special issue is to present innovative research demonstrating that prosody needs to be reconceptualized as an inherently multimodal phenomenon, manifested across the spoken and/or visual domains. The studies included are organized into three core themes. Theme 1 addresses the temporal alignment of spoken and visual aspects of prosody, and how this is shaped by linguistic factors, speaker-specific traits (such as neurodiversity) and language learning patterns. Theme 2 deals with the coordination of spoken and visual aspects of prosody in conveying pragmatic intent, focusing on aspects such as negation, emotion and epistemic stance. Theme 3 explores how visual signals, including head movements and manual signals, fulfil essential prosodic roles across diverse sign language typologies. Taken together, the empirical evidence presented here shows that prosody is also embodied and that our bodily movements can manifest prosodic characteristics. On the one hand, they show the need to comprehensively re-evaluate our understanding of how speakers, listeners and learners engage with the prosodic dimension of language. On the other hand, they reveal that non-referential gestures are deeply meaningful and prosodically structured. Ultimately, visual cues are presented as indispensable for building accurate models of the human language capacity.

Gesture and speech form a tightly integrated system in first language (L1). We know less about the gesture-speech system in second language (L2) production, particularly with respect to speaker proficiency and discourse context. In this study, we focused on the speech and gestures produced by adult Persian (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals with high or low L2 proficiency and English native speakers (n = 22/group). We asked whether speaker proficiency (native, high, low) and discourse context (narratives, explanations) influence the amount, diversity and complexity of speech and gesture production. Our results showed an effect of context, with greater production of speech and gesture in narratives than explanations across proficiency levels. More importantly, we found an effect of proficiency – with lower speech complexity coupled with greater gesture complexity in bilinguals with low proficiency, particularly in the explanation context – suggesting a compensatory role for gesture among bilinguals with low L2 proficiency in more demanding communicative contexts.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on ad hoc concepts and linguistic relativity. We argue that empirical research on linguistic relativity can be re-interpreted through the lens of ad hoc cognition, a framework originating in Barsalou’s (Memory & Cognition, 11, 211–227, 1983) account of goal-derived categories and expanded by Casasanto and Lupyan’s (The conceptual mind: New directions in the study of concepts. MIT Press, 2015) proposal that all conceptual representations are context-sensitive constructions. We begin by placing the argument in historical context, outlining how prototype theory and ad hoc categorisation challenge accounts of fixed, feature-based conceptual structure, motivating instead a view of concepts as dynamically assembled in response to situational demands. We then introduce the studies comprising this special issue, which collectively investigate language–thought interactions across diverse perceptual, conceptual and linguistic domains using a wide array of linguistic typologies and experimental methodologies. Across these contributions, a coherent pattern emerges: linguistic effects on cognition are graded rather than categorical, shaped by task demands, memory load, the availability of verbal resources and the experiential histories of speakers. We argue that this perspective reframes the Whorfian question, shifting from a binary ‘does language affect thought?’ to a systematic investigation of when, how, and to what degree language dynamically modulates conceptual processing.