Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers' novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay.…

The "temporal-focus hypothesis" claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space-time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Pitch is often described metaphorically: for example, Farsi and Turkish speakers use a "thickness" metaphor (low sounds are "thick" and high sounds are "thin"), while German and English speakers use a height metaphor ("low", "high"). This study examines how child and adult speakers of Farsi,…