Volume 24, Issue 4

Two-way typological patterning between satellite- and verb-framed languages in construal of Manner of motion is well attested in speech (e.g. Slobin 2006) and gesture (e.g. McNeill 2001), but contradictory findings exist regarding a third category of equipollently-framed languages (Slobin 2004b). This study examined elicited descriptions of motion from 14 native speakers of Mandarin-Chinese (equipollently-framed), 13 native speakers of English (satellite-framed), and 16 native speakers of Japanese (verb-framed). Results showed that Mandarin and English speakers encoded Manner in speech significantly more than Japanese speakers, and rarely added Manner to gesture when it was absent from speech. However, Mandarin speakers differed from Japanese but also English speakers in gestural highlighting of Manner, where they frequently encoded Manner in speech but not in accompanying gestures, focusing instead on other aspects of the event, specifically Path. These results support a partial three-way typological distinction in construal of motion.

This paper describes an experimental study which attempts to reconcile two usage based approaches to questions with long distance dependencies (LDDs): the Lexical Template Hypothesis (Dąbrowska 2004, 2008; Verhagen 2005, 2006) and Goldberg's BCI (“Backgrounded Constituents are Islands”) constraint (Goldberg 2006; Ambridge and Goldberg 2008). The study replicates Ambridge and Goldberg's (2008) results supporting the BCI constraint; but it also shows that (1) LDD questions with think and say , the verbs which are part of the hypothesised templates, are judged to be more acceptable than predicted by BCI and (2) BCI cannot explain complementizer effects (why LDD questions with that are judged less acceptable than questions without that ). The results also suggest that there are considerable individual differences in speakers' sensitivity to the constraint. Thus, the two hypotheses are complementary: BCI explains why certain LDD questions are more acceptable than others, and hence accounts for differences in the frequency of prototypical and unprototypical LDD questions, while the lexical template hypothesis explains the effects of the frequency of use on speakers' mental grammars.

Research in cognitive linguistics has emphasized the role of embodiment in metaphor comprehension, with experimental research showing activation of perceptual simulations when processing metaphors. Recent research in conceptual processing has demonstrated that findings attributed to embodied cognition can be explained through language statistics. The current study investigates whether language statistics explain processing of primary metaphors and whether this effect is modified by the gender of the participant. Participants saw word pairs with valence (Experiment 1: good–bad ), authority (Experiment 2: doctor–patient ), temperature (Experiment 3: hot–cold ), or gender (Experiment 4: male–female ) connotations. The pairs were presented in either a vertical configuration ( X above Y or Y above X ) matching the primary metaphors (e.g., HAPPY IS UP, CONTROL IS UP) or a horizontal configuration ( X left of Y or Y left of X ) not matching the primary metaphors. Even though previous research has argued that primary metaphor processing can best be explained by an embodied cognition account, results demonstrate that statistical linguistic frequencies also explain the response times of the stimulus pairs both in vertical and horizontal configurations, because language has encoded embodied relations. In addition, the effect of the statistical linguistic frequencies was modified by participant gender, with female participants being more sensitive to statistical linguistic context than male participants.

This study looks at the effect of one's first language type, as proposed by Talmy (2000) and Slobin (2004), on their second language acquisition. Talmy (2000) gives an account of languages as being either verb-framed or satellite-framed based on how path and manner of motion are encoded in motion events. Meanwhile, Slobin (2004) argues for a third language type, which he calls equipollently-framed. This study compares and contrasts the learning curves of equipollently-framed language (Mandarin Chinese) native speakers and verb-framed language (Japanese) native speakers as they learn a satellite-framed language (English). It examines not only the learner's pattern preferences, but also their manner of motion encoding preferences and deictic verb usage to show that there is a clear difference in how the two groups of learners acquire a second language of a different type from their own native language.