Gender-fair language makes women and people of other genders, their interests, and achievements more visible. However, critics argue that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of texts. This study tests these assumptions specifically concerning the gender asterisk, a form of gender-fair language that makes people…

Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing…

This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, "TA," in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender…

We investigated the effect of culture and social status on sarcasm interpretation. Two hundred U.K. participants and 200 Chinese participants read scenarios in which the final comment could be either literal or sarcastic criticism and the speaker had equal, higher, or lower social status compared to the recipient. Comments were rated on degree of…

This study examines sex differences in emotion word use in retrospective private and public relationship dissolution accounts through two studies. Study 1 (n = 423) found men's use of negative emotion words in private breakup accounts correlated with their use of negative emotion words in their public accounts; however, women's emotion words in…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the production and detection of common, everyday deception. Experiment 1 was a naturalistic study in which participants provided their most recent truthful and deceptive (both sent and received) text messages. Participants in Experiment 2 were asked to generate text messages that were either deceptive or…

In a direction-giving task, we examine whether a high-level constraint--the task partners' relative body alignment--influences spatial language use and task accuracy. In 32 pairs, task partners interacted in two conditions: for one route description, direction givers (DGs) and direction followers (DFs) sat side-by-side ("aligned"…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

Romantic relationships vary in quality, and the purpose of the present investigation was to examine a wide scope of linguistic variables as possible markers of this variability. Ninety-six undergraduate students within committed romantic relationships were asked to write freely about their partnership, following which they reported on relationship…

Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

Previous investigations of satire posit that satire comprehension is influenced by prior knowledge, satirical strategies, and other demographic features, such as age. However, these claims have not yet been tested using online processing techniques. In this study we investigate satire processing using newspaper headlines from the satirical…

We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed…

Metaphor theory bears many implications for counseling processes, but metaphor in extended counseling talk is seldom evaluated. This article reports an exploratory skin conductance and discourse analysis of metaphorical versus literal communication styles in facilitating affective engagement over time. After background interaction with the…