Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a…

Speakers of many languages around the world rely on body-based contrasts (e.g., "left/right") for spatial communication and cognition. Speakers of Yupno, a language of Papua New Guinea's mountainous interior, rely instead on an environment-based "uphill/downhill" contrast. Body-based contrasts are as easy to use indoors as…

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts' features--the number of concepts they occur in ("distinctiveness/sharedness") and likelihood of co-occurrence ("correlational…