Music can support social bonding, especially in face-to-face interactions, but its effects in online environments with reduced social cues are less understood. This study examined how shared music listening in an audio-only online setting affects social presence, affective responses, and subsequent cooperation. In a within-subjects design, 38 individuals were assigned to music-preference-matched dyads to complete cooperative tasks after listening to music in both a socially framed shared listening condition and a solo condition. Shared listening increased social presence compared with solo listening, and music-induced arousal was positively associated with social presence across conditions. Cognitive empathy moderated the effects of listening condition on both social presence and arousal, suggesting that individual differences in social-cognitive processing shape how shared listening in technology-mediated environments is experienced. However, shared music listening did not improve task performance and its effects on interaction quality were mixed. Group flow was adversely affected by shared listening, whereas dyad-level differences in music-induced arousal reduced emotional interdependence during cooperation, but only after shared listening. In addition, higher positive valence was associated with lower behavioral interdependence after shared listening but higher behavioral interdependence after solo listening. Together, these findings suggest that socially framed shared music listening can enhance the subjective social character of online interaction, while shaping interaction quality through affective alignment and perceived mutual adaptation rather than uniformly improving task-focused cooperation.
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in how multilingualism modifies executive functions. Heart rate variability (HRV), a noninvasive and innocuous indicator of cardiac autonomic function, can also capture individual differences that link cognitive performance with physiological and emotional profiles. This pilot study aimed to analyze the association of multilingualism with cognitive, autonomic, and emotional regulation during working memory (WM) tasks, while also considering trait anxiety (Trait-A). Nineteen young adults were classified as a monolingual group (MON, N = 9) or a multilingual group (MUL, N = 10). Participants completed the State‑Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Neuropsychological Battery of Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes (BANFE‑3). They then performed an N-back task at three difficulty levels while HRV linear and nonlinear indices were computed. MON exhibited high Trait‑A, whereas MUL showed moderate Trait‑A. No significant differences were observed in the BANFE-3 subtests, but MUL achieved greater accuracy at the 2-back level of the N-back task. HRV indices showed a load-dependent decline in both groups; within-group analyses, however, revealed that MON and MUL participants showed different within-group autonomic response patterns to cope with the rising cognitive load. These findings suggest that sustained multilingual experience may be associated with differences in autonomic–cognitive responses and attenuated anxiety-related disruptions, underscoring the value of HRV in characterizing individual variability in physiological and behavioral responses.
Sound symbolism research reveals a non-arbitrary relationship between phonetics and meaning, demonstrating strong associations between consonant sounds and perceived shape, size, or material. Onomatopoeias, a subset of sound-symbolic expressions, directly imitate the sound they describe. Previous evidence suggests that onomatopoeias encode sound-symbolic cues, even across unfamiliar languages, but no specific research has been done specifically on material-related sound symbolism. To examine how the phonetic and semantic features of onomatopoeic words influence material perception, we conducted a semantic differentiation task with Turkish-speaking participants (N = 28) unfamiliar with Japanese. Stimuli consisted of three-word sets: 14 Turkish words, 14 semantically similar Japanese words, and 14 phonetically similar Japanese words. For example, the Turkish word mır mır (a humming sound) shares a similar meaning with the Japanese word hiso hiso (speaking in a low or hushed tone), and shows phonetic similarity to the Japanese word miri miri (slowly tearing or stretching something tightly). Participants rated each word on seven adjective pairs: (1) flat-bumpy, (2) warm-cold, (3) wet-dry, (4) light-heavy, (5) smooth-rough, (6) slippery-sticky, and (7) granular-whole. Equivalence testing further indicated that phonetically similar pairs more frequently fell within predefined equivalence bounds and showed smaller deviations across adjective dimensions. Multidimensional scaling additionally revealed smaller perceptual distances between Turkish words and their phonetically similar Japanese counterparts. Together, these findings suggest that phonetic similarity contributes more strongly than semantic similarity to cross-linguistic material-related judgements. Furthermore, the results highlight distinctive sound patterns shared by Japanese and Turkish onomatopoeias, suggesting the existence of universal phonetic markers for material-related sound symbolism.
This paper develops a theoretical account of humor processing in terms of two interacting routes of cognitive processing. Building on the distinction between propositional and imagistic modes of language comprehension, it argues that humorous incongruity may arise through conceptual, perceptual, or cross-representational discrepancies. The propositional route involves relatively abstract and amodal representations, in which humor emerges from a mismatch between conceptual expectations and asserted or implied meanings. The imagistic route involves mental imagery, perceptual simulation, and sensorimotor representation, in which humor emerges from discrepancies between expected and activated perceptual or multimodal representations. In addition, the paper proposes that humorous effects may arise through between-route incongruity, where propositional and imagistic representations conflict, as in cases where verbal content and gesture, visual imagery, or embodied cues convey incompatible meanings. This dual-route account is not intended to replace existing theories of humor, but to specify a processing-level distinction that clarifies how incongruity is represented and resolved across verbal, visual, and multimodal forms of humor. By linking humor processing to conceptual processing, mental imagery, and embodied cognition, the account provides a framework for explaining why formally similar humorous expressions may differ in cognitive demands, perceptual salience, and affective impact. The paper concludes by outlining implications for future behavioral, cognitive, and multimodal research on humor processing.
A growing body of research suggests that numerical magnitude is associated with spatial response coding, as demonstrated by the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect. Recent work has extended this question beyond Arabic digits to linguistic expressions of quantity, including grammatical number. The present study examined whether Turkish singular and plural word forms show spatial-response patterns compatible with SNARC-like mappings. Eighty-six native speakers of Turkish completed a combined Go/No-Go lexical decision and grammatical number judgment task. Participants responded to real Turkish words while withholding responses to pseudowords; response mappings were counterbalanced such that singular forms were associated with the left-hand response and plural forms with the right-hand response in the typical mapping condition, with the reverse assignment in the non-typical mapping condition. Reaction times were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. Participants responded faster in the typical mapping condition than in the non-typical mapping condition, and plural forms elicited slower responses than singular forms overall. However, the interaction between grammatical number and response mapping was not significant. These findings suggest that Turkish grammatical number can interact with spatial response organization, but the observed pattern is better interpreted as a general SNARC-compatible mapping advantage rather than a fully differentiated spatial mapping of singular and plural forms. The form of this association may depend on task characteristics.
