How do we distinguish fact from opinion? We tested whether people's ability to detect opinion-based content--as indicated by the use of subjective adjectives (e.g., "amazing," "frustrating")--depends on the linguistic position of the adjective. Our results show that simply changing the linguistic structure of a sentence…

Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a…

The present article aims to shed light on the relationship between priming and creativity throughout Chinese children's ontogenetic development. It has been suggested that priming in naturalistic interaction occurs not as an exclusively implicit phenomenon. New methodological desiderata beyond traditional acceptability judgments have been…

In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…

When making requests, speakers need to select from a range of alternative forms available to them. In a corpus of naturally occurring Italian interaction, the two most common formats chosen are imperatives and interrogative constructions that include a turn-initial dative pronoun "mi" "to/for me", which is referred to as the "Mi X"? format in this…

This study investigated changes in both the liar's and the conversational partner's linguistic style across truthful and deceptive dyadic communication in a synchronous text-based setting. An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more…