No abstract

Recent research has suggested that language processing activates perceptual simulations. We have demonstrated that findings that have been attributed to an embodied cognition account can also be explained by language statistics, because language encodes perceptual information. We investigated whether comprehension of emotion words can be explained by an embodied cognition or a language statistics account. A corpus linguistic study comparing emotions words showed that words denoting the same emotions (happy-delighted) co-occur more frequently than different emotions (happy-angry). These findings were used in two experiments in which participants read same-emotion and different-emotion sentence pairs. Sentence pairs with different emotions yielded longer RTs than sentences with the same emotions both in a cognitive task tailored toward linguistic representations and a task tailored toward embodied representations. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature that demonstrates that language processing does not always rely solely on perceptual simulation.

People rely on spatial-temporal metaphor when they talk and think about abstract temporal concept. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the mechanism of the multi-dimensional spatial-temporal conceptual metaphor in Chinese. Using the spatial cuing paradigm, we examined the cognitive impact of the Chinese vertical and horizontal spatial-temporal metaphor, and explored the dominant dimension between the two metaphors in context. The results showed that the processing of temporal concepts for Chinese speakers involved not only the horizontal spatial-temporal metaphor, but also the vertical spatial-temporal metaphor. The horizontal dimension was the dominant dimension of spatial-temporal metaphor in the processing of temporal concepts in Chinese. The findings demonstrated that representation of time depends on representation of space, supporting the Metaphorical Structuring View.

We assessed empirical support for (a) the widely held notion that across so-called “honor, dignity, and face cultures,” internal and external components of self-esteem are differentially important for overall self-esteem; and (b) the idea that concerns for honor are related to internal and external components of self-esteem in honor cultures but not in dignity and face cultures. Most importantly, we also set out to (c) investigate whether measures are equivalent, that is, whether a comparison of means and relationships across cultural groups is possible with the employed scales. Data were collected in six countries ( N = 1,099). We obtained only metric invariance for the self-esteem and honor scales, allowing for comparisons of relationships across samples, but not scale means. Partly confirming theoretical ideas on the importance of internal and external components of self-esteem, we found that only external rather than both external and internal self-esteem was relatively more important for overall self-esteem in “honor cultures”; in a “dignity” culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. Contrary to expectations, in a “face” culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. We were not able to conceptually replicate earlier reported relationships between components of self-esteem and the concern for honor, as we observed no cultural differences in the relationship between self-esteem and honor. We point toward the need for future studies to consider invariance testing in the field of honor to appropriately understand differences and similarities between samples.

The relationship between language and thought has received a great deal of attention in linguistics. An increasing amount of empirical literature now suggests that our native language can affect how we think about the world around us. The present study asked two groups of participants to read the same story and to judge the attribution of the responsibility of a character in the story who may have caused an accident. One group of participants consisted of native Spanish speakers reading a Spanish version of the text; the other group consisted of native English speakers reading an English version of the text. The results showed that the native language of the participant yielded a subtle, but significant, indicator of attribution of responsibility. This finding supports the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which states that one's native language affects the way one conceptualizes the world.