Abstract A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers’ linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, #cogs12697-bib-0006), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, #cogs12697-bib-0003) found support for the latter view, showing that adults’ […]

Abstract We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a carousel and motorbike while hearing sentences with noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP) modifiers like “The girl who […]

Abstract Languages around the world use a recurring strategy to discuss abstract concepts: describe them metaphorically, borrowing language from more concrete domains. We “plan ahead” to the future, “count up” to higher numbers, and “warm” to new friends. Past work has found that these ways of talking have implications for how we think, so that […]