This study undertook iconicity ratings and conducted transparency experiments on Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Experiment 1 compared the iconicity ratings of 520 lexical signs of ten Deaf ISL signers and thirteen hearing non-signers. Ratings were found to be affected by language knowledge, lexical class, and type of iconic mapping, as well as by…

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…

This study aims to understand if Mandarin late learners of English can successfully manipulate acoustic and kinematic cues to deliver English stress contrast in production. Mandarin (N = 8) and English (N = 8) speakers were recorded producing English trochaic (initial stress) and iambic (final stress) items during a nonword repetition task.…

The aim of the study was to focus on whether visual processing differs between distinct levels of reading competence in young adults, from a regular orthography. We compared the 10% highest scoring (HRC) and the 10% lowest scoring groups (LRC) of reading competence (using the word chain test, WCT) in visual processing of global coherent motion and…

Theories of perceptual decision making have been dominated by the idea that evidence accumulates in favor of different alternatives until some fixed threshold amount is reached, which triggers a decision. Recent theories have suggested that these thresholds may not be fixed during each decision but change as time passes. These collapsing…

Expression of motion shows systematic inter-typological variability between language types, particularly with respect to manner and path components of motion: speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-language; e.g. German) frequently conflate manner and path into a single clause, while verb-framed language speakers (V-language; e.g. Spanish)…

This paper presents a discussion on potential conflicts originated by sensorimotor distractions when learning with mobile phones on-the-move. While research in mobile learning points to the possibility of everywhere, all the time learning; research in the area suggests that tasks performed while on-the-move predominantly require low cognitive…

We report a study that explored the mechanisms used in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion predicates (verbs and prepositions) cross-linguistically. Motion stimuli were presented to English- and Greek-speaking adults and preschoolers accompanied by (a) a novel intransitive verb, (b) a novel transitive verb, (c) a novel transitive preposition,…

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events (e.g., "two nuns walk to a house") and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages…

There is currently an explosion in the number and range of new devices coming onto the technology market that use digital sensor technology to track aspects of human behaviour. In this article, we present and exemplify a three-stage model for the application of digital sensor technology in applied linguistics that we have developed, namely,…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

To locate objects in the environment, animals and humans use visual and nonvisual information. We were interested in children's ability to relocate an object on the basis of self-motion and local and distal color cues for orientation. Five- to 9-year-old children were tested on an object location memory task in which, between presentation and…

In the course of language development children must solve arbitrary form-to-meaning mappings, in which semantic components are encoded onto linguistic labels. Because sign languages describe motion and location of entities through iconic movements and placement of the hands in space, child signers may find spatial semantics-to-language mapping…

This study examined 6-month-old infants' abilities to use the visual information provided by simulated self-movement through the world, and movement of an object through the world, for spatial orientation. Infants were habituated to a visual display in which they saw a toy hidden, followed by either rotation of the point of observation through the…