Research on text readability has traditionally focused on structural indicators of linguistic complexity, while less attention has been given to how lexical properties influence readers’ subjective perceptions of text quality, particularly during development. This study investigates the role of conceptual concreteness and lexical specificity in shaping children’s perceptions of textual clarity and informativeness. Children aged 9–12 read short texts manipulated along these two dimensions and evaluated them on 5-point Likert scales measuring clarity (ease of understanding and absence of confusion) and informativeness (perceived quantity and relevance of information). Mixed-effects models reveal that concreteness strongly predicts perceived clarity, regardless of age. In contrast, specificity primarily affected perceived informativeness, increasing judgments of informational richness and relevance, with stronger effects among older children.
This study investigated whether Chinese-English bilinguals show forward/backward action compatibility effects when processing environmental concepts in their first language (Chinese) and second language (English). Fifty-two unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals categorized environmental protection and environmental pollution words while making forward or backward joystick movements in compatible and incompatible conditions. The results showed a significant overall compatibility advantage, with faster responses in compatible than incompatible conditions. Chinese words were processed faster overall than English words, reflecting an L1 processing advantage. However, the compatibility effect did not significantly differ between Chinese and English, suggesting a similar action compatibility pattern across the two languages. Additional analyses showed that the overall compatibility advantage remained after controlling for emotional valence and arousal, although both affective variables also predicted response latencies. A corpus-based co-occurrence analysis further suggested that distributional language experience may partly contribute to environmental-spatial associations. These findings indicate that bilinguals’ processing of environmental concepts is sensitive to forward/backward spatial compatibility, but this sensitivity likely reflects the joint contribution of spatial association, affective evaluation, and distributional language experience rather than a purely metaphorical mapping.
Despite longstanding assertions that first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition rely on fundamentally different processes, recent research increasingly questions this dichotomy by exploring the cognitive mechanisms underlying them. The present study investigates the contribution of two explicit learning abilities, language analytic ability and non-verbal abstract reasoning, traditionally deemed irrelevant for L1 acquisition, in accounting for individual differences in grammatical comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. Adult native speakers of English were tested on their ability to comprehend various syntactic structures in their L1 as well as in a newly acquired artificial language. Our findings revealed that language analytic ability and non-verbal reasoning contribute to variance in grammatical comprehension in both languages. Additionally, considerable interindividual variation was observed in the L1 task, challenging the prevailing view of uniformity in native grammar acquisition. These results underscore the role of explicit learning mechanisms in both native and non-native language acquisition and suggest that the cognitive factors influencing them are more similar than previously recognized.
Interlocutors use prosodic cues to package information – highlight or background certain units – to achieve communicative goals such as prompting responses or stating facts. This study investigates how whistlers transpose the prosodic strategies of Spoken Turkish into the reduced acoustic system of Whistled Turkish, in which the narrow band of frequency primarily transposes segmental features. We conducted an experimental study focusing on polar questions and focus constructions, measuring and comparing frequency, intensity and duration values of focused and non-focused constituents. In polar questions, the prosodic cues of Spoken Turkish were transposed into the whistled modality in that a constituent preceding the question particle had higher frequency values compared to its non-focused counterparts. However, this strategy was obscured by frequency modulations caused by vowel-consonant transitions. In focus constructions, only the immediate preverbal position was marked by frequency modulations, which is suggested to be the unmarked focus position in Spoken Turkish. The results indicate that the frequency channel is used in Whistled Turkish to convey both segmental features, which carry the lexical information necessary for intelligibility, and prosodic information. There are modality-specific trade-offs, and whistlers exert more effort to transpose the prosodic cues that convey high benefits to achieve communicative efficiency without a breakdown.
In line with the principle of isomorphism, formally reduced expressions such as clippings or abbreviations develop distinct social and/or semantic functions. This article argues that such differentiation follows the principles of communicative efficiency, with accessibility playing a central role. The claim is supported by a corpus-based comparison of the full form artificial intelligence and the abbreviated form AI in online news and Reddit comments. The short form is used far more frequently in the informal Reddit comments, which rely on a rich common ground, than in the news data. The two forms also display distinct semantic and grammatical profiles. Using distributional semantics (word and sentence embeddings) and Universal Dependencies, I show that the division of semantic and grammatical ‘labor’ between the forms is efficient. The abbreviated form tends to express more accessible meanings related to individual user experience, whereas the full form is more strongly linked to less accessible, abstract meanings of AI as a scientific field, industrial sector, technology or machine capability. In addition, the abbreviated form more often serves as the first element of compounds, whereas the full form often functions as a prepositional modifier, in line with principles of efficient word order.
Listeners flexibly adapt utterance interpretation based on speaker characteristics, but less is known about how this works in multiparty conversations, particularly for pragmatic inferences like Mutual Exclusivity (MEI) - the tendency to map novel terms onto unnamed referents. MEI may reflect a flexible, speaker-sensitive process or a rigid default. This study tested whether listeners modulate MEI based on speaker-specific referential consistency in multiparty conversations. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted (Exp 1: N = 32, English; Exp 2: N = 44, Spanish), where participants followed instructions from two speakers. In experimental conditions, one speaker was consistent (reused labels), while the other was inconsistent (sometimes relabeled objects). Control conditions featured two consistent speakers. Results showed robust and early MEI across conditions. No speaker-specific adaptation occurred, but Experiment 1 showed context-general adaptation: exposure to an inconsistent speaker within a conversation reduced MEI overall. Findings suggest that in high-demand communicative contexts, MEI operates as a strong default heuristic, largely resistant to speaker-level inconsistency. Evidence for sensitivity to broader contextual reliability was observed in Experiment 1 but did not replicate in Experiment 2, leaving open whether MEI exhibits limited contextual flexibility or whether the initial finding reflected design-specific factors.
Although syntactic priming is often studied in a purely cognitive framework, individual differences in rates of syntactic priming may be related to other social-cognitive and sociolinguistic factors. One such factor may be perspective-taking, in that the ability to take into account the thoughts and feelings of another person may relate to individual differences in the frequency of syntactic priming. To date, however, the limited research investigating this question has used non-interactive measures of perspective-taking in which participants self-report their perspective-taking tendencies or reason about third-party characters. To address this gap, participants in the present study will complete three different perspective-taking tasks, and we will examine whether individual differences in perspective-taking relate to syntactic priming rates during an interactive task. Given some evidence that perspective-taking scores are higher in bilingual versus monolingual individuals, we will also estimate perspective-taking scores and rates of syntactic priming based on participants’ multilingualism scores. Analyzing whether and how perspective-taking and multilingualism relate to variability in rates of structural priming will help inform our understanding of the social-cognitive mechanisms that contribute to linguistic alignment.
Phonaesthetics examines why some languages are perceived as more aesthetically appealing than others, independent of meaning. Here we test whether phonetic and phonological properties predict listeners' evaluations of 24 European languages using studio-quality recordings of native speakers reading the same text. 204 participants rated each recording on four dimensions: beauty, eros, status and order on 0-100 scales and indicated whether the language sounded familiar. Because familiarity reliably boosts evaluations, we first quantified its impact and then focused our main analyses on trials where languages were not recognized. We fitted Bayesian multilevel models with random intercepts for listener and language to examine a broad set of predictors: consonant place and manner distributions, vocalic share, voiced consonants, a sonority index, vowel height and backness and suprasegmental typology (speech rate, syllable structure, stress and rhythm type). Across most model families, effects were small and uncertain, with credible intervals (CrIs) overlapping zero, and variance was dominated by between-listener differences. The clearest and most consistent segmental signal was vowel height: a higher proportion of close vowels predicted lower status and order ratings. Overall, the results suggest that while a few fine-grained segmental cues may shape specific evaluative dimensions, phonaesthetic judgments are strongly shaped by listener-level variability, with only a small number of fixed individual-difference and phonetic predictors showing robust associations.
Numbers have mathematically defined, formal meanings, which afford precision and objectivity. In practice, however, we show that round numbers are frequently used approximately, and this approximate use depends on magnitude. Across three analyses of British and American English, we demonstrate the following: (1) people use round numbers more often, and round to a greater extent, at higher magnitudes; (2) the distributional semantics of larger round numbers resemble those of indefinite hyperbolic numbers such as ‘gazillion’, which lack a precise value; and (3) larger jigsaw puzzles have greater discrepancies between round advertised piece counts and the actual values (e.g., advertising ‘13,200 pieces’ when the actual count is 13,224). We argue that the relationship between roundness, magnitude and approximation derives from the base-10 structure of English numerals, which renders powers of 10 structurally salient, creating hotspots for communicative functions such as approximation. We discuss how these communicative patterns align with the approximate number system, which cognitively represents larger quantities with increasing imprecision, making them harder to estimate and compare.
Based on a semantic verbal fluency task, this study investigated the category internal structure in Chinese-speaking people with aphasia. The results show that the aphasia patients had a similar category internal structure to the healthy controls. For one thing, the patients produced basic-level and subordinate concepts at a similar rate to healthy controls. For another, the top 10 correct responses made by the patients and healthy controls were almost the same. In addition, the sociodemographic factors like age, education and gender did not play a significant role in the category production for the patients, but aphasia severity, type, cognitive functions and working memory strongly affected their category production. Overall, this study shows that the patients’ conceptual system seemed to be somewhat intact since they produced correct responses at a very high rate, like healthy controls and their differences mainly lay in quantity. This suggests that aphasia patients’ main problems may lie in lexical access to their conceptual system.
Face-to-face communication often involves multiple iconic cues (gestural, suprasegmental and segmental) to convey meaning. Previous research shows that gestural and suprasegmental iconicity cues, as well as gestural and segmental iconicity cues, often co-occur, suggesting that speakers combine visual and acoustic forms of iconicity to reinforce meaning. This study investigates whether listeners can simultaneously utilize both suprasegmental and segmental iconic cues in the same speech stimuli to associate sounds with meaning. Finnish-speaking participants were presented auditorily with pseudowords consisting of suprasegmental and segmental iconicity cues referring to shape-related concepts (Experiment 1) or magnitude-related concepts (Experiment 2). The study showed that these two dimensions of acoustic iconicity are processed relatively independently, yet in parallel, for linking the speech signal to meaning.
SHAME and GUILT refer to compositional emotional experiences, some aspects of which are shared across linguacultures, while others are shaped by socialisation. This study combines questionnaire and corpus data to explore how people talk about and possibly experience SHAME and GUILT in English and Japanese contexts. First, keyword analysis is used to identify English and Japanese expressions frequently used in SHAME- and GUILT-inducing situations. These keywords are treated as potential markers of SHAME and GUILT. The focus then shifts to emotion co-occurrence. Assuming that emotions rarely occur in isolation, I examine patterns of lexical co-occurrence in two general corpora of Japanese and English, using some of the previously identified keywords as nodes. The findings suggest that FEAR and SADNESS have a dominant role in the emotional landscapes of SHAME and GUILT in both languages. In the English data, we find references to ANGER and DISGUST, while in the Japanese data, GUILT is more strongly associated with the semantic sphere of ‘responsibility’. Methodologically, the study exemplifies an innovative approach to operationalising emotion through terms that emerge from the data itself and is more generally relevant to scholars interested in questions that revolve around (relative) ineffability and linguacultural variation.
This study investigates the emergence of metaphorical meanings in abstract visual symbols within an ‘alien language’ artificial language learning game. Findings reveal that participants extend concrete meanings to abstract meanings based on metaphorical mappings proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but not consistently across all cases. When multiple salient mappings are possible, participants’ choices exhibit greater variability. Certain mappings, such as SAD IS DOWN and ANGER IS FIRE, are particularly salient and chosen frequently, whereas others, like POWERFUL IS UP, show less consistency. Additionally, some unexpected mappings were observed. While some could be explained via post hoc analysis, others remain unexplained. Experimental manipulations to enhance the salience of metaphorical mappings did not significantly alter participant responses. Overall, results suggest that participants spontaneously engage in semantic and metaphorical meaning extensions, supporting the idea that these cognitive mechanisms underpin polysemy and the conventionalisation of new word senses. Participants make choices for semantic extensions in a motivated manner, with some extensions being based on conceptual metaphorical mappings, and others on other types of salient associative mappings. This study contributes to theories of language evolution that highlight the central role of metaphor in shaping meaning extensions and the cultural emergence of linguistic structure.
This study combines corpus-based comparison and open-ended survey data to investigate kinship terminology usage in introductory contexts across languages. Focusing on the expression 'this/here is my brother', it examines how speakers of English and Chinese introduce a brother, with particular attention to whether they use a kinship term alone or add an appositive personal name. In addition, an open-ended questionnaire was completed by 119 participants representing 10 language backgrounds. The study further explores the cognitive motivations underlying these cross-linguistic differences in introductory kinship expressions. The results show that: (1) in the corpus data, Chinese speakers tend to introduce their brothers using kinship term alone, whereas English speakers typically include the brother's personal name; (2) the questionnaire data suggest that many European-language speakers prefer a 'kinship term + name' pattern, whereas East Asian-language speakers more often rely on the kinship term alone and (3) these patterns can be interpreted with reference to the Focus-Shift Principle, the Principle of Least Effort and Typological Markedness. Overall, the study extends the English-Chinese corpus comparison to a broader multilingual sample and offers a cognitively informed account of recurring cross-linguistic tendencies in brother-introduction contexts.
Age-related syntactic processing abilities are not only associated with linguistic competence in later life but also reflect cognitive decline progression. However, findings remain inconsistent regarding older adults' performance in processing complex syntactic structures. While clinical studies frequently utilize speech pauses to assess syntactic processing abilities and cognitive impairment risk in ageing populations, relatively few investigations have examined how pauses modulate syntactic processing from a perceptual perspective. Using event-related potential (ERP) techniques, this study examined behavioural and electrophysiological responses in 24 Mandarin-speaking older adults and 24 younger adults under conditions of varying syntactic complexity (garden-path [GP] versus 'non-garden-path') and pause existence (pause-absent versus pause-present). The results demonstrated significant ageing effects: older participants exhibited longer reaction times (RTs), enhanced P600 amplitudes and reduced mean power in theta-band and alpha-band compared to younger adults. Notably, pauses improved older adults' accuracy in processing GP sentences, which elicited larger P600 amplitudes. Furthermore, pauses facilitated increased activation of both N400 and P600 components. These findings collectively suggest that pauses effectively facilitate complex syntactic processing in Mandarin-speaking older adults.
Functional approaches to language propose that grammatical patterns emerge from efficiency-related pressures in language usage. Recent work further emphasizes that variation and change in grammatical properties may arise from interactions among different dimensions of linguistic behaviour reflecting language usage, including acceptability and online processing. The present study adopts a combined-method approach by conducting an experiment that integrates speeded acceptability judgements with self-paced reading to examine how these behavioural dimensions interact and relate to cross-linguistic grammatical variation in three closely related West Germanic languages: English, Dutch and German. Focussing on permissive subjects, we examine how acceptability, decision dynamics and processing cost pattern across languages and construction types. The results reveal a systematic cross-linguistic gradient, with English and Dutch showing lower processing cost and higher acceptance of permissive subjects than German. The behavioural dimensions systematically reflect typological patterns but differ in how human cognition internalizes them, revealing a lead-lag relationship. Processing efficiency forms the leading edge of internalization, followed by acceptability. The observed asymmetry in usage preferences supports a scenario suggesting a gradual pathway from processing efficiency to linguistic uncertainty in acceptability and grammatical change.
Using 3,154 tokens from American English, we test whether optionality in verb-particle placement increases speech-planning cost, measured as pre-verbal silence. Tokens were coded for object properties, idiomaticity and verb frequency. We find that pre-verbal silence does not differ between split (pick the book up) and joined (pick up the book) orders. While idiomaticity favours the joined order, it does not raise planning cost. Verb frequency shortens pauses only in fast speech, suggesting predictability acts lexically, not structurally. Choice symmetry does not lengthen pauses. We therefore fail to reject the null hypothesis: the two orders are equally easy to plan. This null result, from tests designed to detect a theoretically predicted effect, aligns with other evidence that syntactic choice imposes no production cost. We conclude that variation in verb-particle constructions (VPCs) is cost-free; distributional differences reflect object properties and idiomaticity, not derivational markedness.
Happiness is a complex concept that has been intensively researched from many perspectives, but the linguistic aspects of this phenomenon are still under-researched. Using corpus-based analysis of semantically similar words (word embedding), the author studies lexical units denoting happiness and joy in three West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and compares them with the corresponding lexical units in English. The results show that despite the mutual linguistic and non-linguistic ties, the Polish, Czech and Slovak understanding of happiness exhibits not only similarities (e.g. the relationship between happiness and joy and the outward orientation of joy) but also significant differences (e.g. the different value of the component ‘luck’ in happiness, a different relationship between joy, sadness and fear, and cross-cultural differences related to religion). The results also highlight similarities and differences between West Slavic languages and English. In addition to this, the study tests the advantages and limitations of the word-embedding analysis for the analysis of concepts and their culturally specific features. The author believes that the method is useful because it offers new insights into the analysed data, but it also requires human oversight and careful interpretation.
The FrameNet project is a large-scale frame-semantic database with a seemingly usage-based core: It draws on 200,000 annotated sentences from representative corpora and offers the most comprehensive description of semantic valency patterns in English to date. Nevertheless, its empirical validity is weakened by the lack of statistical information on the distribution of lexical units, frames and frame elements. Similarly, the characterisation of frame elements as core, core-unexpressed, peripheral or extra-thematic - intended to indicate their essentiality to a frame - is primarily motivated on theoretical grounds. This raises the question of whether these labels are consistent with actual language use. After exhaustively extracting frequency data from Python's NLTK FrameNet Corpus for all attested combinations of verbs, frames and frame elements, hierarchical gradient boosting models were trained on information-theoretic measures and word embeddings to predict the coreness of frame elements. The models provide strong usage-based evidence for a general core versus non-core distinction but cast doubt on further subdivisions such as core versus core-unexpressed or peripheral versus extra-thematic. While further validation is necessary, this contribution offers the first statistical perspective on the current state of FrameNet and its compatibility with usage-based approaches.
