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.