Five-to-six-year-olds' abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first-to-third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic…

Experimental work has shown that spatial experiences influence spatiotemporal metaphor use. In these studies, participants are asked a question that yields different responses depending on the metaphor participants use. It has been claimed that English speakers are equally likely to respond with either variant in the absence of priming. Related…

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, "sound symbolism," or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these…

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the…

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…