In language learning, learners engage with their environment, incorporating cues from different sources. However, in lab-based experiments, using artificial languages, many of the cues and features that are part of real-world language learning are stripped away. In three experiments, we investigated the role of positive, negative, and mixed…

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non-linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In…

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization…