This randomized controlled study examined effects of mandala (structured and unstructured) and instruction (directed expression and free expression) on state anxiety, mood, and state mindfulness. Participants included 69 undergraduates randomly assigned to one of four conditions following anxious mood induction. The design followed 2 (mandala) X 2…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

Two experimental paradigms, a picture-naming task and a Stroop interference task, were employed to address the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon; more specifically, the process of multilingual non-selective lexical access. German-English-French speakers named objects in their native and most dominant language in a task that included a…

The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully…

Vantage Theory (VT) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) both rely crucially on the cognitive phenomenon of categorization as well as on the semantic/pragmatic notion of participant point of view in making claims about human linguistic production and perception. In this paper these commonalities of commitment are explored, as are the differences in the ways…

The Polish set of terms for blue includes, inter alia, the following adjectives: "niebieski" "blue", "blekitny" "(sky) blue", "granatowy" "navy blue", "lazurowy" "azure", "modry" "(intense) blue" and "siny" "(grey) violet-blue". The adjective "niebieski" is the basic term; however, it shares some of its functions with "blekitny", which is…

The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective "vysokij" "high", a morphologically unrelated…

The applicability of Vantage Theory (VT), a model of (colour) categorization, to linguistic data largely depends on the modifications and adaptations of the model for the purpose. An attempt to do so proposed here, called Extended Vantage Theory (EVT), slightly reformulates the VT conception of vantage by capitalizing on some of the entailments of…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

An expression-induction model was used to simulate the evolution of basic color terms to test Berlin and Kay's (1969) hypothesis that the typological patterns observed in basic color term systems are produced by a process of cultural evolution under the influence of biases resulting from the special properties of universal focal colors. Ten agents…

A comparison of terms from the lexical domain of color naming across 10 different sign languages from 7 different sign language groups suggested that, for naming colors, sign languages follow universal patterns not dependent upon the channel of language expression and reception. (Author)

A study investigated the reciprocal relationship between colors and semantic terms--just as certain semantic terms elicit thoughts of particular colors, so those colors may also elicit their reciprocal semantic terms. Twenty-six students were each shown 18 words: 3 each of bipolar pairs that expressed evaluation, activity, or potency. The students…

Three experiments using 3- and 4-year-olds as subjects tested the hypothesis that focal colors are more salient than nonfocal colors for young children and are the areas to which color names initially become attached. (NH)

This article discusses the species designation and taxonomies of Delaware and Algonkian and presents eight classifications of taxa by form, habitat, color, movement, sound, use, relationship, and appearance. Relevant research is also reviewed. (CLK)