Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems…

Causation is a core feature of human cognition and language. How children learn about intricate causal meanings is yet unresolved. Here, we focus on how children learn verbs that express causation. Such verbs, known as lexical causatives (e.g., break and raise), lack explicit morphosyntactic markers indicating causation, thus requiring that the…

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of…

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be…