Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience--such as color perception--be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand and reason abstractly about color, implying that color associations in everyday language might contribute to the metaphorical understanding of color.…

Color terms divide the color spectrum differently across languages. Previous studies have reported that speakers of languages that have different words for light and dark blue (e.g., Russian "siniy" and "goluboy") discriminate color chips sampled from these two linguistic categories faster than speakers of languages that use…

Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their…

The relationship between bilingual language control and executive control is debated. The present study investigated the effect of short-term language switching in a comprehension task on executive control performance in unbalanced bilinguals. Participants were required to perform a context task and an executive control task (i.e., flanker task)…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has…

Via two reading experiments, this exploratory study examined the effects of over- and under-specified linguistic input on L2 online processing of Chinese referring expressions (REs). In each experiment, a group of advanced L2 Chinese speakers (all with Uyghurs as L1) and a control group of native Chinese speakers read 48 sets of 4 sentence pairs…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

Red Culture is one of the symbols of Chinese national spirit in China. With the enhancement of China's international status, the world gets to know the Red Culture stage by stage. And yet, in the process of Red Culture's foreign publicity, the depth and breadth of cultural diffusion have been affected by different factors. This paper objectively…

Language is a major tool for an individual to communicate. The phonological & morpho-syntactic components are involved in functions of language processing & executions. Case marker is one of the morpho-syntatic feature, which describes the abstract meaning of the grammatical components of nouns & verbs and in formation of meaningful…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…