In two social perception experiments, we explore the relationship between the social meaning and the semantic/pragmatic properties of the intensifier totally in American English. In Experiment 1, we show that totally is perceived as a more salient index of social identity categories – measured in terms of Age, Solidarity and Status attributes – when it targets a scalar dimension grounded in the speaker's attitude, as opposed to when it occurs in contexts where the scale is provided by the subsequent predicate. In Experiment 2, we show that the social indexicality of totally is even more salient in contexts in which the intensifier, by virtue of its pragmatic contribution, invites a stance of heightened proximity and convergence between the interlocutors. These results point to a principled connection between the semantic, pragmatic and personality‐based social meanings of totally, providing new insights into the dynamics whereby different layers of meaning conspire to determine what an expression ‘says’ when deployed in interaction.

People often accommodate to each other's speech by aligning their linguistic production with their partner's.According to an influential theory, the Interactive Alignment Model, alignment is the result of priming.When people perceive an utterance, the corresponding linguistic representations are primed and become easier to produce.Here we tested this theory by investigating whether pitch (F0) alignment shows two characteristic signatures of priming: dose dependence and persistence.In a virtual reality experiment, we manipulated the pitch of a virtual interlocutor's speech to find out (1) whether participants accommodated to the agent's F0, (2) whether the amount of accommodation increased with increasing exposure to the agent's speech, and (3) whether changes to participants' F0 persisted beyond the conversation.Participants accommodated to the virtual interlocutor, but accommodation did not increase in strength over the conversation and disappeared immediately after the conversation ended.Results argue against a priming-based account of F0 accommodation and indicate that an alternative mechanism is needed to explain alignment along continuous dimensions of language such as speech rate and pitch.

In recent years, researchers have successfully used information about cultural identity and consumption behavior to uncover class-based variation in linguistic production data. Is this variation reflected in implicit class-related language attitudes, of which listeners may not even be aware? And which types of evaluative conceptualizations of class membership do listeners in fact use? In a two-alternative forced choice task, we compared how listeners associate linguistic variables with both more classic and newer conceptualizations of class membership. High social class responses were significantly more likely for standard linguistic variants than for nonstandard linguistic variants (for all five types of social class conceptualizations we used). The fact that there was no difference between the class conceptualizations indicates that conceptualizations in terms of economic production, culture, and consumption were equally successful in probing evaluative reactions to class-based linguistic variation in the region investigated.

Metaphoric Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Languages Defu Yap (yapd@uchicago.edu) Laura Staum Casasanto (lcasasanto@uchicago.edu) Daniel Casasanto (casasanto@uchicago.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Chicago 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 USA Abstract Metaphoric iconicity in gestures Since Saussure, the idea that the forms of words are arbitrarily related to their meanings has been widely accepted. Yet, implicit metaphorical mappings may provide opportunities for iconicity throughout the lexicon. We hypothesized that vertical spatial metaphors for emotional valence are manifested in language through space in signed languages and through the spatialized dimension of pitch in spoken languages. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the directions of the hand motions constituting words in three signed languages, and related them to the valence of their English translation equivalents. The vertical direction of signs predicted their valences. On average, signs with upward movements were the most positive in valence, and signs with downward movements the most negative. Signs with non-vertical movements were intermediate in valence. Experiment 2 extended this type of analysis to a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese. The pitch contours of Chinese words predicted the valence of their English translation equivalents. These results demonstrate a previously unrecognized source of non-arbitrariness in language, revealing that implicit space-valence metaphors are encoded in the forms of words in both signed and spoken languages. Keywords: Metaphoric iconicity; Conceptual metaphor; Valence Introduction Since Saussure (1959), the idea that words’ forms are arbitrarily related to their meanings has been widely accepted. According to Saussure, the meaning of “tree” is unmotivated by the letters a-r-b-r-e in French, since in principle it can be represented by any other letters in other languages, such as t-r-e-e in English. The documented exceptions to arbitrariness tend to fall into a narrow range of categories, such as ideophones (e.g., Bang! and tinkle sound like their referents; Nuckolls, 2004), phonaesthemes (e.g., words having to do with noses like snout and sniffle tend to start with the sound /sn/; Bergen, 2004), the bouba-kiki phenomenon (Maurer et al., 2006) and iconic signs in signed languages (e.g., the sign for two in American Sign Language is two extended fingers). These kinds of iconic relationships rely on concrete qualities of the referent being echoed in the form of the word, so only certain meanings are eligible to participate in them. Beyond these special exceptions, are form-meaning relationships in languages truly arbitrary? If not, what are the sources of non-arbitrariness in language? Are there constraints that influence form-meaning relationships systematically throughout our lexicons? Iconic form-meaning relationships are common in the gestures we produce when we speak (McNeill, 1992). Iconic gestures depict some concrete aspect of the referents of the words they accompany (e.g., raising the hand to indicate that a rocket went higher). In a special class of iconics called metaphoric gestures (McNeill, 1992), concrete objects or relationships are depicted with the hands in order to represent some aspect of an abstract idea (e.g., raising the hand to indicate that a students’ grades went “higher”; Cienki, 1998; Sweetser, 1998). In metaphoric gestures, abstract ideas that we can never see or touch can nevertheless be represented with the hands via conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). People often talk about abstract, non-spatial entities using spatial words (e.g., a long time, a high price, or a close friendship). Beyond talking in linguistic metaphors, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that people also think in mental metaphors (Casasanto & Bottini, 2013, for review): implicit associations between non-linguistic representations in abstract target domains and relatively concrete source domains like space, force, and motion (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Although target domains like time are nearly impossible to depict gesturally, per se, their source domains can often be depicted: A long time can be indicated by a long-distance sweep of the hand; a distant time can be represented by gesturing toward a far-away point in space (see Cienki & Muller, 2008, for numerous examples of metaphorical gestures). Metaphoric iconicity in languages Although the evidence for metaphoric iconicity in gestures is strong, this type of iconicity is generally assumed not to extend to language. Even signed languages, which share a modality with hand gestures and therefore have the potential to express spatial iconicity, have been characterized as exhibiting largely arbitrary form-meaning mappings, in part for historical reasons having to do with establishing American Sign Language (ASL) as a full-fledged language, and not a simple system of pantomimes (Klima & Bellugi, 1979). Taub (2001) noted that signed languages’ potential for iconicity is expanded by their ability to depict aspects of metaphoric source domains in sign, as in gesture. She and others have shown metaphoric iconicity in a number of ASL signs (see also Emmorey, 2001). In a multiple-choice test, non-signers were able to match the meanings of some metaphoric signs in ASL to their English glosses (O’Brien,

abstractLinguistic acceptability judgments are widely agreed to reflect constraints on real-time language processing. Nonetheless, very little is known about how processing costs affect acceptability judgments. In this paper, we explore how processing limitations are manifested in acceptability judgment data. In a series of experiments, we consider how two factors relate to judgments for sentences with varying degrees of complexity: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender’s memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results indicate that multiple sources of processing difficulty can combine to produce super-additive effects, and that there is a positive linear relationship between reading span scores and judgments for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to processing costs. These patterns do not hold for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to factors other than processing costs, e.g., grammatical constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of relationships to reading span scores can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty on acceptability judgments, although these tests cannot be used in contexts of extreme processing difficulty.

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Although this conclusion is intuitively clear to native speakers who have encountered the phenomenon, it is challenging to rule out the possibility that these examples are mere repetition disfluencies. In this paper, our goal will be to empirically support the intuition that spoken examples of this putative exception, which we will refer to as "ISIS", following Zwicky (2002), don't "sound" disfluent, i. e., they don't have the acoustic properties of disfluencies. The first person to publish an observation of this special property of is was Dwight Bolinger, in his 1987 article entitled "The remarkable double IS. " He thought that the phenomenon was "not more than two or three decades old," despite an isolated example from a letter written by Charles Darwin that he cites:

Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclusions. First, the arguments against processing accounts are based on null results using tasks that may be ineffective or inappropriate measures of working memory (the n -back and serial-recall tasks). The authors provide no evidence that these two measures predict judgments for other constructions that are difficult to process and yet are clearly grammatical. They assume that other measures of working memory would have yielded the same result, but provide no justification that they should. We further show that whether a working-memory measure relates to judgments of grammatical, hard-to-process sentences depends on how difficult the sentences are. In this light, the stimuli used by the authors present processing difficulties other than the island violations under investigation and may have been particularly hard to process. Second, the Sprouse et al. results are statistically in line with the hypothesis that island sensitivity varies with working memory. Three out of the four island types in their experiment 1 show a significant relation between memory scores and island sensitivity, but the authors discount these findings on the grounds that the variance accounted for is too small to have much import. This interpretation, however, runs counter to standard practices in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology.

Misapplying working-memory tests:A reductio ad absurdum* Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto, and Ivan A. Sag The preceding discussion note by Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012b; SWP2) sidesteps the objections we raised in our critique (Hofmeister et al. 2012; HSS) of their 2012a article (SWP1). In the process, they attempt to deflect attention away from the fundamental issue at stake: is the experimental method used by SWP1 an effective diagnostic of the role of processing factors in acceptability contrasts? The answer to this question, as far as anyone knows, is 'no'. Hence, as we argue in HSS, the absence of a correlation between memory measures and acceptability contrasts is unsurprising and in no way undermines processing-based accounts of island effects. Processing-based accounts of islands centered around working-memory (WM) limitations, like those of Kluender & Kutas 1993 and Hofmeister & Sag 2010, DO predict a relationship between WM measures and judgments for islands IF AND ONLY IF: (i) the relevant WM measures tap the resources used in processing sentences with island-violating dependencies, and (ii) the relevant examples allow for individual variation to emerge.1 But neither concern has been satisfied by SWP. They do not establish that their chosen memory measures (or any other) systematically relate to judgments for ANY hard-to-process but grammatical sentences, nor that this relationship applies universally across the spectrum of sentence processing difficulty. SWP2 fail to even address point (ii), while they attempt to defuse point (i) by a purely 'in-principle' argument. In essence, they try to deflect concern about (i) by speculating that other WM tasks would have produced similar results, implying that there should be little concern about their choice of memory measures. Putting aside serious concerns about whether memory tasks are so interchangeable (and the unaddressed fact that the n-back and serial-recall tasks are not WM tasks; see Kane et al. 2004), this still leaves unanswered the question of how the magnitude of acceptability contrasts tied to resource limitations relates to memory measures. In other words, it is premature to argue about whether all memory tasks relate in the same way to judgments for hard-to-process structures if we do not know that ANY memory measure systematically predicts acceptability judgments for such structures! The relevance of (ii) to this issue is not merely a theoretical concern, either. In practice, both HSS and SWP have independently validated objection (ii). In HSS, we showed that perhaps the most widely used WM measure, the reading span, fails to predict variation in judgments for extremely hard-to-process sentences (see also Waters & Caplan 1996), even though they predict variation for 'moderately' difficult items. Indeed, both SWP1 and SWP2 fail to mention their finding that judgments for the poster child of grammatical, hard-to-process structures—multiple center-embeddings—were, in fact, higher for individuals with LOWER MEMORY SCORES on their tests (Sprouse 2009), contrary to the hypothesis that higher scores should equate to higher acceptability judgments for sentences that stress WM resources. This evidence belies SWP2's claim that 'the naturalness or discourse felicity of our materials have little to [End Page 408] do with the debate' (p. 402), since in any investigation of individual differences, the nature of the test materials matters. For example, if the materials universally cause computational breakdown, then individual differences will be inconsequential. What we can say for certain on the basis of this evidence is that there is no known UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE way in which memory measures relate to acceptability judgments. Beyond this, we are faced with a stark example of the conclusions we would be forced to draw if we accepted SWP's logic: if a failure to find a correlation between WM measures and acceptability decrements is evidence that grammatical constraints—and not processing constraints—underlie a contrast, then both HSS and SWP have 'evidence' that multiple center-embeddings are ruled out by grammar and not by processing. In light of this reductio, we conclude that there is simply nothing new to be learned from either SWP1 or SWP2 about how grammatical constraints and processing factors like WM limitations interact in the processing of island structures.2 Their conclusions that processing...

Bodily mimicry often makes the mimickee have more positive feelings about the mimicker. Yet, little is known about the causes of mimicry's social effects. When people mimic each other's bodily movements face to face, they can either adopt a mirrorwise perspective (moving in the same absolute direction) or an anatomical perspective (moving in the same direction relative to their own bodies). Mirrorwise mimicry maximizes visuo-spatial similarity between the mimicker and mimickee, whereas anatomical mimicry maximizes the similarity in the states of their motor systems. To compare the social consequences of visuo-spatial and motoric similarity, we asked participants to converse with an embodied virtual agent (VIRTUO), who mimicked their head movements either mirrorwise, anatomically, or not at all. Compared to participants who were not mimicked, those who were mimicked mirrorwise tended to rate VIRTUO more positively, but those who were mimicked anatomically rated him more negatively. During face-to-face conversation, mirrorwise and anatomical mimicry have opposite social consequences. Results suggest that visuo-spatial similarity between mimicker and mimickee, not similarity in motor system activity, gives rise to the positive social effects of bodily mimicry.

Linguists build theories of grammar based largely on acceptability contrasts. But these contrasts can reflect grammatical constraints and/or constraints on language processing. How can theorists determine the extent to which the acceptability of an utterance depends on functional constraints? In a series of acceptability experiments, we consider two factors that might indicate processing contributions to acceptability contrasts: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender's working memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results suggest that multiple sources of processing difficulty combine to produce super -additive effects, but multiple grammatical violations do not. Furthermore, when acceptability judgments improve with higher working memory scores, this appears to be due to functional constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of differences in working memory can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty (due to functional constraints).

Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor. Laura Staum Casasanto 1 (laura.casasanto@mpi.nl) Kyle Jasmin 1 (kyle.jasmin@mpi.nl) Daniel Casasanto 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Neurobiology of Language Group, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Abstract But are immediate social motivations necessary to make speakers accommodate? Or might speakers accommodate even in the absence of a desire to achieve direct interactional goals? Mechanistic theories of dialogue (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) offer one possible alternative. Automatic alignment processes could account for convergence in linguistic behavior. That is, speakers might use similar linguistic forms to those used by their interlocutors because these forms are highly active and thus have an advantage over alternatives in the selection process. On another alternative, accommodation could be a consequence of a speaker’s attempt to achieve longer-term social goals: accommodation could be part of how speakers develop the linguistic styles that they use to communicate social information about themselves to others and to indicate their membership in social groups. This could occur in tandem with or independent of interaction-specific social goals. Distinguishing these alternatives is difficult because in real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous; in any conversation between two real people, the interlocutors may have social goals and relationships that could be influencing their linguistic behavior. Experimenters have attempted to deal with this complexity in a few ways. Experiments using pre-recorded speech in repetition paradigms have uncovered alignment between a speaker and a recording (Babel, 2009). However, because these experiments do not involve conversation, it’s difficult to know whether the same mechanisms underlie speakers’ production in these tasks and their accommodation in conversations. In other experimental paradigms, the conversational setting is retained by using a confederate (Hannah & Murachver, 1999). However, no human confederate can entirely prevent his or her speech from being influenced by the naive participant’s speech. Introducing a confederate means losing experimental control over precisely those social and linguistic variables that might matter the most. This makes it difficult to assess the extent to which accommodation on the part of the participant depends upon their own interactional motivations, and to what extent it is a response to their interlocutor’s behavior. Virtual Reality (VR) provides an opportunity to engage participants in a conversational interaction with an interlocutor whose speech is not influenced by their speech, and can be varied systematically along a single dimension. Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation. Keywords: Conversation; alignment; virtual reality. interaction; accommodation; Introduction Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of multi-party interactions both in the laboratory and in natural conversation have suggested that two or more speakers in a conversation tend to align their linguistic behavior along several dimensions: lexical choice (Barr & Keysar, 2002; Bortfeld & Brennan, 1997; Niederhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002), phonetics (Alim, 2004; Pardo, 2006), and syntactic constructions (Gries, 2005), among others. The fact that accommodation occurs is well accepted, but the motivations for this convergence between speakers have been a matter of debate. Studies of natural conversational interactions have identified social/interactional factors that influence how much speakers accommodate (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973). Based on these studies, it appears that a speaker accommodates towards or away from their interlocutor to achieve interactional goals: to make one’s interlocutor do, think, or feel things. This can involve conveying social information, such as information about their social stances toward their interlocutor or toward a group that their interlocutor belongs to (Coupland, 1985). Accommodation could also help to coordinate joint actions being negotiated through conversation (Brennan & Clark, 1996).

A pair of experiments addressed two questions regarding listeners’ sociolinguistic knowledge: First, how do listeners use facts about speech to inform their beliefs about speakers? Second, and conversely, how might listeners use facts about speakers to inform their perceptions of speech? Results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that listeners can infer characteristics of speakers from their use of an individual sociolinguistic variable. Results of Experiment 2 show that listeners use social information about speakers to understand ambiguous speech. Together, these results show bidirectional influences between language processing and the process of social inferencing: information in the speech stream affects inferences about social characteristics of the speaker, and social information affects speech perception. What do Listeners Know about Sociolinguistic Variation? Laura Staum Casasanto*