Previous research has shown that motor information influences visual and semantic tasks. However, not much is known about the specific influence of structural, action-relevant information on language processing. In the current study, participants were instructed to observe a prime graspable object (e.g., a frying pan) that could be presented with the action-relevant component (that is its handle) oriented either toward the left or toward the right. Subsequently, they performed a property verification task on a following target word, which could describe an action-relevant (e.g., handle) or action-irrelevant (e.g., ceramic) characteristic of the just-encountered object. They were required to make a keypress response with either a key on the same side as the depicted action-relevant component of the prime object (that is compatible key) or on the opposite side (that is incompatible key). Results show that property verification judgements for action-relevant words were faster in the spatially compatible condition than in the spatially incompatible condition, whereas judgements for action-irrelevant target words were not affected by spatial compatibility. These findings suggest that spatialized object properties are not mandatorily linked to manual response biases. Rather, this link seems to be modulated by trial-by-trial changes in conceptual focus.

Language is known to interact flexibly with non-verbal representations, but the processing mechanisms governing these interactions remain unclear. This article reviews general cognitive processes that operate across various tasks and stimulus types and argues that these processes may drive the interactions between language and cognition, regardless of whether these interactions occur cross-linguistically or within a language. These general processes include goal-directed behaviour, reliance on context-relevant semantic knowledge and attuning to task demands. An overview of existing findings suggests that resorting to language in non-verbal or multi-modal tasks may depend on how linguistic representations align with current task goals and demands. Progress in understanding these mechanisms requires theories that make specific processing predictions about how tasks and experimental contexts encourage or discourage access to linguistic knowledge. Systematic testing of alternative mechanisms is necessary to explain how and why linguistic information influences some cognitive tasks but not others.

The integration of multiple linguistic modules – syntax, semantics and pragmatics – poses a persistent challenge for adult second language (L2) learners, as posited by the interface hypothesis (IH). This study examines how crosslinguistic influence impacts L2 learners’ acquisition and processing of Korean quotative constructions at the syntax–semantics–pragmatics interface. Using offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading tasks, we compared Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean. The results revealed that Japanese-speaking learners outperformed Chinese-speaking learners in offline tasks, demonstrating native-like sensitivity to case-marking constraints, likely due to the structural similarities between Japanese and Korean. However, neither learner group exhibited sensitivity to case-marking violations during real-time processing, unlike native Korean speakers. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and online processing abilities, supporting the IH and emphasizing the persistent challenges of integrating multiple linguistic domains in L2 processing. This study underscores the role of crosslinguistic influence in facilitating explicit knowledge acquisition while revealing its limitations in fostering native-like automaticity in online processing.

Whether or not pre-planning extends beyond the initial noun in a noun phrase depends, in part, on the phrase’s dependency structure. Dependency structure disambiguates, in many contexts, the noun phrase’s reference. In the present experiment (N = 64), we demonstrate that advance planning is affected by the extent to which a dependency supports semantic disambiguation. Participants produced noun phrases in response to picture arrays. Syntax and lexemes were held constant, but semantic scope was manipulated by varying the contrastive functions of the first and the second noun. Evidence from eye-movement data revealed a stronger tendency for early planning in the extended scope condition. This is evidence that pre-planning requirements of structurally complex noun phrases are, in at least some contexts, determined by semantic functions.

This study investigated the effects of audience design and goal bias in Chinese speakers’ message generation of source-goal motion events (e.g., A bird flies from the tree to the house), using picture description and memory tasks. The status of the source (e.g., the tree) or the goal (e.g., the house) was manipulated as known or unknown to the confederate addressees. The findings revealed that the participants were more likely to omit the sources when they were mutually known to the addressee than when they were not. However, participants showed similar accuracy in detecting source changes, regardless of whether the sources were known to the addressee. Moreover, they consistently mentioned goals and showed similar accuracy in detecting goal changes, regardless of whether the goals were known or unknown to the addressee. The results suggest that audience design influenced the speakers’ mention of sources, but not their memory of them. It did not affect either the mention or the memory of goals. Goal bias was not consistently observed across the two experiments, both linguistically and in memory. This suggests a fragile goal bias in Chinese. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that audience design and goal bias influence the message generation of motion events in Chinese speakers.

Highly frequent discourse particles (DPs) express speaker attitudes and guide utterance interpretation, but we still lack a satisfactory explanation of how DPs are actually processed. Some results show facilitation, while others show processing costs. Previous studies have aimed to elicit core meanings of DPs embedded in highly plausible contexts, in contrast to more unlikely contexts that force two quite different interpretations. The present study uses a novel eye-tracking experiment where DPs instead are presented in low-constraint contexts. The plausible interpretations consist of two ends of a natural scale: the state change of color that fades or becomes dirty (black to gray or white to gray). This design renders a more direct reflection of how DPs alter context interpretation. Results show that DPs induce immediate reanalysis, and this reanalysis differs in magnitude depending on the kind of DP used. We suggest that the processing of DPs involve three dimensions: i) linguistic intuition about the DP, ii) assumptions about speaker meaning and iii) contextual considerations. The results are interpreted through the communicative principle of language, under-specificity and the maxim of quantity. We also suggest that diverging results from previous studies in the field can be explained using the same analytical lens.

The study employs a corpus-based frame analysis, grounded in Barsalou’s frame notion, as a complementary methodological approach to metaphor analysis for studying emotion concepts. We examine the conceptualization of the German ‘Angst’, which is widely recognized as a uniquely German emotion concept, yet it remains insufficiently studied. Through a systematic analysis of linguistic patterns, this study reconstructs the frame structure of ‘Angst’ based on 200,319 instances extracted from newspaper and social media data. The findings show that ‘Angst’ arises from diverse factors, including threats to life and health, prosperity, status, identity, power, relationships and the need for certainty and stability. There is an awareness and acceptance of ‘Angst’, reflected in the openness to expressing personal fear and addressing the fear of others in media discourse. When contextualized within insights from other disciplines, it becomes evident that the ‘Angst’ is rooted in universal biological foundations while also shaped by Germany’s sociohistorical context. Furthermore, it exhibits both alignment with and divergence from its philosophical conceptualization. These insights expose ‘Angst’ as both a psychological and cultural construct and demonstrate the advantage of combining frame analysis with corpus linguistic methods in capturing the specific structures of emotion concepts from large-scale data.

We investigated how the presence of linguistic labels, their iconicity and mode of presentation (cued vs not cued) affect non-linguistic cognitive processing, focussing on the learning and visual discrimination of new categories. Novel species of aliens that mimicked natural categories were paired with iconic labels, non-iconic labels or no labels across two tasks. In the Training task participants learnt to categorise the aliens, with results showing that both labels and iconicity improved categorisation. We then used a Match to Sample task to test how these variables affect rapid visual discrimination. Results showed that the presence of labels, their iconicity and label cueing all lead to more rapid and accurate visual discrimination of newly acquired categories. We argue that this is due to iconicity exaggerating sensory expectations provided by linguistic labels, made more readily accessible by cueing. We also examine the possible implications of our results for the discussion about language evolution.

This study examined how word identification is influenced by interword spacing and morphological complexity in Thai, a script without interword spacing. While previous research supported the facilitative effect of interword spacing on Thai word identification, they did not account for the potential effects of the words’ morphological structure. The challenge of word identification becomes more pronounced when readers have to identify compound words (e.g., bathroom) when reading sentences without interword spacing. In an eye-tracking experiment that manipulated interword spacing (unspaced, spaced) and noun type (bimorphemic compound, monomorphemic) in Thai sentences, we confirmed previous findings that interword spacing has a facilitative effect on word identification, as evidenced by shorter first fixation duration, gaze duration and total fixation time. Furthermore, we observed an interaction effect indicating that interword spacing had a larger facilitative effect on the identification of compounds compared to monomorphemic words. Our results also revealed that the morphological structure of Thai words can influence saccadic movements, e.g., the first fixation landing position was closer to the beginning of compounds than to simple words. We suggest that the orthography-language interface, a language-specific feature, should be considered a major component in eye movement models of reading.

Situated at the junction of Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology, this study investigates how participants perceive the structure of 18 perceptual dimensions of opposites across the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory modalities. The structures include three components: two poles (high; low) and an intermediate (neither high nor low). Participants were asked to provide examples of contexts for each dimension for which they could experience the five sensory modalities and then describe their experiences of the structures with respect to whether the poles were experienced as a single property (Point), or a range of properties with or without a precise limit (Bounded Range or Unbounded Range respectively). For the intermediate region, they described if they experienced a single property (Point) or many (Range) or none (No Intermediates). The study centres on two main questions. Is the perceptual structure invariant across the sensory modalities? If not, how do the structures differ? The study shows that the overall structure of all dimensions was stable in at least two of the modalities, and many structures were stable across more than two modalities. Stability was particularly pertinent across the visual and tactile modalities, and the gustatory and olfactory modalities.

Auditory verbal hallucinations are a common phenomenon in the general population, with many people without psychological issues reporting the experience. In the ‘White Christmas’ method to induce auditory hallucinations, participants are told that they will be played a portion of the song ‘White Christmas’ and are asked to report when they hear it. Participants are presented only with stochastic noise; still, a large proportion of participants report hearing the song. The experiments reported here investigate how masking relationships modulate verbal hallucinations in the White-Christmas effect. Specifically, we tested how the effect is modulated by different kinds of maskers (multi-talker babble versus spectrally matched speech-shaped stochastic noise) and different kinds of expectation of the speech being masked (expecting a ‘normal’ modal voice versus a whispered voice behind the masking). The White Christmas effect was replicated, and the rate of verbal hallucinations was higher for multi-talker babble than for spectrally-matched speech-shaped stochastic noise. In addition, a trend for a higher rate of hallucination for whispered voices was found. These results confirm the role of masking relations in the White Christmas effect and reinforce the similarity between the White Christmas effect and continuity illusions such as phoneme restoration.

Idioms are undoubtedly important for second language (L2) learners, who encounter them in instructed learning, textbooks/resources and in out-of-class language use. While research on first language (L1) and L2 idiom comprehension shows how well L1/L2 speakers understand various idioms and the role of different predictors, important questions remain about how knowledge varies with more difficult task types and stimuli, how well L1 ‘norms’ serve L2 learners, how subjective and objective predictors of idiom knowledge interact and how L2 learner inferencing works in learning idioms. To address these issues, university-age L1 and L2 English (L1 German) participants provided meaning descriptions and familiarity ratings for 100 challenging idioms from learner resources, and each idiom was assigned an OpenAI-generated transparency rating, corpus-based frequency and to one of six cross-language overlap (CLO) types. Descriptive statistics showed lower and more varied idiom meaning knowledge than might be expected, especially for the L1ers, who were some way off ceiling level. Mixed-effects regression revealed familiarity and transparency as positive L1 and L2 knowledge predictors, but groups differed in sensitivity to idiom frequency, which only mattered for the L1ers and CLO, which (as expected) only mattered for the L2ers, who mistook false friends as genuine allies.

Although German, as a grammatical gender language, requires noun–pronoun agreement in anaphora, exceptions to the rule occur, e.g., in possessive constructions when the gender-incongruent possessive pronoun sein (masculine/neuter, his/its) refers to feminine antecedents instead of congruent ihr (feminine, her). While this violation is merely grammatical for inanimate referents, it can provoke semantic mismatches for human possessors (especially gender-specific female nouns like die Hexei – seini (the witch – his/its), but less so with gender-indifferent human nouns, such as die Kontaktperson (the contact person). A self-paced reading (SPR) experiment tested the acceptability and processing of sentences in which incongruent sein referred to feminine possessors, which differed in animacy status (inanimate versus human). Introducing this agreement violation reduced acceptability and elevated reading and reaction times (RTs), but effects varied by antecedent animacy. These results suggest an animacy restriction in possessive reference and substantiate the impact of meaning-based gender cues on pronominalization.

Variation is present in every language at every structural level. Though extremely complex, linguistic variation is not fully unpredictable. Previous research suggests that cognitive biases in learning favour conditioned variation: learners often make languages more predictable by eliminating variation or by conditioning it on context, pointing to the presence of biases against random variation. Learning biases favour lexical conditioning over more general category-based conditioning, though both occur in natural languages. Interaction may also contribute to shaping conditioned variation by providing a mechanism for interlocutors to develop a shared system through the coordination of individual preferences. In the present study, we investigated the role of dyadic interaction in the emergence of conditioned variation. We trained participants on an artificial language with unpredictable variation in plural marking and objects representing one or two semantic categories and had them play a communication game using the newly learned language. We hypothesised that interaction would introduce category-based conditioning, this being the simplest conditioned system in the language. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence of spontaneous category-based conditioning: participants either removed variation or conditioned marker use on lexical items. Further experiments are needed to explain the emergence of this common linguistic pattern.

Pragmatic theories generally agree that the derivation of implicit meaning depends on the assumption that the speaker is cooperative and knowledgeable, as well as the contextual relevance of the implicature. Studies on scalar implicature priming have investigated the latter, but the influence of the first two factors remains understudied. Here, we investigated the effect of the presence (or absence) of a cooperative and knowledgeable interlocutor on the derivation of both lexical and ad-hoc scalar implicatures. We found an effect of implicature priming within and across different scales. The presence of an interlocutor increased implicature derivation overall and partially enabled priming effects across lexical and ad-hoc scales. These results provide some support for the existence of a scalar implicature derivation mechanism shared by lexical and ad-hoc scales, and they highlight the importance of the speaker’s cooperative attitude and knowledgeability as part of this process. Moreover, they show the importance of psycholinguistic investigations to be carried out using rich conversational contexts that include intentional agents.

Verbal fluency (VF) tasks are used in cognitive assessments to detect early signs of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. This study aimed to assess the contribution of VF tasks with varying executive processing loads to the early identification of cognitive impairment in the preclinical stage of subjective cognitive decline (SCD). A total of 97 older adults were classified into three groups: healthy controls (HC), SCD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Participants completed phonemic, semantic, alternating and orthographic VF tasks. Education level significantly affected VF performance, with gender differences being inconsistent. The HC and SCD groups performed similarly in phonemic and semantic tasks but differed significantly in high-executive-load tasks, where SCD participants performed worse. MCI patients showed lower performance across all VF tasks. Discriminant and ROC analyses identified alternating and orthographic VF tasks as effective markers for distinguishing cognitive status, supporting their potential for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.

Prosody not only signals the speaker’s cognitive states but can also imitate various concepts. However, previous studies on the latter, the iconic function of prosody, have mostly analyzed novel words and nonlinguistic vocalizations. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study has examined the iconic potential of the prosodic features of existing Japanese imitative words known as ideophones. In Experiment 1, female Japanese speakers pronounced 20 sentences containing ideophones in infant-directed speech. They used a higher f0 to express faster and more pleasant movements. Similar iconic associations were observed in Experiment 2, in which Japanese speakers chose the best-matching pitch–intensity–duration combination for each of the ideophones. In Experiment 3, Japanese speakers chose the best-matching voice quality – creaky voice, falsetto, harsh voice or whisper – for the ideophones. Falsetto was preferred for a light object’s fast motion, harsh voice for violent motion and whisper for quiet motion. Based on these results, we entertain the possibility that the iconic prosody of ideophones provides a missing link in the evolutionary theory of language that began with iconic vocalizations. Ideophones with varying degrees of iconic prosody can be considered to be located between nonlinguistic vocalizations and arbitrary words in this evolutionary path.

Skilled and impaired language users can fail to understand sentences with noncanonical thematic role ordering. To advance understanding of the cause of the difficulty, we compared noncanonically ordered, object-experiencer-verb (OE) sentences to canonical agentive sentences in otherwise comparable syntactic structures. However, the field has neglected to consider that OE thematic roles may be altered by the comprehender’s interpretation; the aim of the investigation reported here was to address this research gap. We collected participants’ thematic role interpretations for sentences while measuring incremental processing speed as they read the sentences in a self-paced reading paradigm. Fluent English speakers rated the intent of the subjects of OE and agentive active sentences and of the objects of OE and agentive passive sentences. Consistently high ratings of intent identified a cluster containing agentives and an OE eventive subtype with an agent. In contrast, a spread of ratings in a second cluster suggested labile interpretation for a second OE subtype. Splitting the labile group at its active and passive mean, we compared reading time of OE and agentive sentences with a higher-intent, agent interpretation with OE sentences with a low-intent causer/theme interpretation. Whether active or passive, canonicity as determined by the relative prominence ordering of the rated role compared to the necessary OE experiencer or agentive theme, accounted for reading speed at the verb, second noun, and prepositional phrase. We propose that the results support an agent > experiencer > (causer)/theme thematic role hierarchy, suggesting refinements to event structure theory and little v/CAUS morphology.

The spatial interference effect, whereby words with implicit spatial associations (e.g., ‘bird’) hinder identification of unrelated visual targets (e.g., a square) at the associated locations (i.e., at the top of a display), has been demonstrated many times in English, although it has failed to replicate several times in Italian. The current study tested whether the replication failures in Italian may be due to insufficient semantic processing of the words. Indeed, while languages with highly inconsistent pronunciations, such as English, are more likely to involve semantic processing during word reading, languages with highly consistent pronunciations, such as Italian, tend to evoke weaker semantic processing during reading. In two experiments, semantic processing in Italian was induced by including a high proportion of irregularly stressed words. Spatial interference occurred in both experiments. It is concluded that relatively deep semantic processing is necessary for spatial interference to occur.

Distributional learning enables listeners to form phonetic categories by extracting statistical regularities from speech input. Younger Cantonese speakers can acquire the Mandarin level-falling (T1–T4) contrast through distributional learning, with bimodal exposure facilitating category formation and unimodal exposure suppressing it, and with fine-grained pitch sensitivity predicting success. However, aging is associated with declines in pitch sensitivity and phonetic boundary formation, which may disrupt this process. This study examined whether Cantonese-speaking older adults exhibit distributional learning of Mandarin T1–T4 and whether individual cognitive factors predict learning success. Sixty-four participants completed a pretest–training–posttest procedure with bimodal or unimodal exposure. While older adults improved in tone discrimination, no group differences emerged. Further analysis showed that those with lower pitch-related auditory memory failed to learn from unimodal input. On the other hand, fine-grained pitch perception abilities did not predict learning outcomes. These results suggest that older adults may rely on alternative learning mechanisms, such as memory-based strategies, when exposed to ambiguous input distributions. The findings indicate a shift from perceptual encoding to memory-driven processing in aging and highlight the limits of passive statistical learning in older adulthood.