We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or "other-centric" frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we…

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among…

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed…

Research on the relationship between the representation of space and time has produced two contrasting proposals. ATOM posits that space and time are represented via a common magnitude system, suggesting a symmetrical relationship between space and time. According to metaphor theory, however, representations of time depend on representations of…

Though auditory pitch is customarily mapped in Western cultures onto spatial verticality (high-low), both anthropological reports and cognitive studies suggest that pitch may be mapped onto a wide variety of other domains. We collected a total number of 35 pitch mappings and investigated in four experiments how these mappings are used and…

Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding…

First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children's rapid word learning have sought constraints on word-referent mappings. These constraints are thought to work by enabling learners to resolve the ambiguity inherent…

English uses the horizontal spatial metaphors to express time (e.g., the good days ahead of us). Chinese also uses the vertical metaphors (e.g., "the month above" to mean last month). Do Chinese speakers, then, think about time in a different way than English speakers? Boroditsky [Boroditsky, L. (2001). "Does language shape thought? Mandarin and…