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Westerners are reported to more often direct their eyes upward when thinking about the future and downward whenconceptualizing the past. It is unknown whether this vertical space-time mapping is universally true. We studied Mandarinspeakers gaze positions when they mentally displaced themselves for one minute into the past or future. Unlike westerners,Chinese directed their eyes more downward when conceptualizing the future than the past; such effects were not due todifferences in emotion or thinking difficulty between the past and future. Another study of Chinese peoples eyes duringsentence comprehension showed that participants had higher gazing positions when processing past-related sentencesthan when processing future-related sentences. These eye-gaze related correlates of a vertical mental timeline appearedearlier when processing sentences with space-time metaphors than with neutral time expressions. The differences betweenChinese and westerners show that language and culture can shape peoples eye movements when processing time.

The current study investigates the average effect: the tendency for humans to appreciate an averaged (face, bird, wristwatch, car, and so on) over an individual instance. The effect holds across cultures, despite varying conceptualizations of attractiveness. While much research has been conducted on the average effect in visual perception, much less is known about the extent to which this effect applies to language and speech. This study investigates the attractiveness of average speech rhythms in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese, two typologically different languages. This was tested in a series of perception experiments in either language in which native listeners chose the most attractive one from a pair of acoustically manipulated rhythms. For each language, two experiments were carried out to control for the potential influence of the acoustic manipulation on the average effect. The results confirm the average effect in both languages, and they do not exclude individual variation in the listeners' perception of attractiveness. The outcomes provide a new crosslinguistic perspective and give rise to alternative explanations to the average effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spoken conversations, speakers and their addressees constantly seek and provide different forms of audiovisual feedback, also known as backchannels, which include nodding, vocalizations and facial expressions. It has previously been shown that addressees backchannel at specific points during an interaction, namely after a speaker provided a cue to elicit feedback from the addressee. However, addressees may differ in the frequency and type of feedback that they provide, and likewise, speakers may vary the type of cues they generate to signal the backchannel opportunity points (BOPs). Research on the extent to which backchanneling is idiosyncratic is scant. In this article, we quantify and analyze the variability in feedback behavior of 14 addressees who all interacted with the same speaker stimulus. We conducted this research by means of a previously developed experimental paradigm that generates spontaneous interactions in a controlled manner. Our results show that (1) backchanneling behavior varies between listeners (some addressees are more active than others) and (2) backchanneling behavior varies between BOPs (some points trigger more responses than others). We discuss the relevance of these results for models of human–human and human–machine interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "temporal-focus hypothesis" claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space-time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space-time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co-speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past-in-front/future-at-back (besides future-in-front/past-at-back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past-in-front/future-at-back space-time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space-time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space-time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space-time mappings, but a cross-cultural comparison of space-time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the "temporal-focus hypothesis." Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space-time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space-time mappings and the relationship between language and thought.

This study examines the acquisition process of speech rhythm in Dutch learners of Spanish (DLS) and Spanish learners of Dutch (SLD) at different proficiency levels to determine whether learning direction affects the success of rhythm acquisition in a foreign language (L2). Analyses of lengthening effects showed that the two learner groups followed different developmental paths in their acquisition of accentual and final lengthening: Both groups showed transfer effects from the L1, but while the DLS systematically approached their target until attainment, the SLD showed more variability in their development. In addition, syllable structure complexity affected L2 rhythm acquisition, and to a substantially larger extent for the SLD compared to the DLS. The results support a model of L2 rhythm acquisition in which learning direction is included as a factor, and that allows for the interaction of various language-specific properties that contribute to speech rhythm, like syllable structure complexity.

People typically use verbal probability phrases when discussing risks ("It is likely that this treatment will work"), both in written and spoken communication. When speakers are uncertain about risks, they can nonverbally signal this uncertainty by using prosodic cues, such as a rising, question‐like intonation or a filled pause ("uh"). We experimentally studied the effects of these two prosodic cues on the listener's perceived speaker certainty and numerical interpretation of spoken verbal probability phrases. Participants (N = 115) listened to various verbal probability phrases that were uttered with a rising or falling global intonation and with or without a filled pause before the probability phrase. For each phrase, they gave a point estimate of their numerical interpretation in percentages and indicated how certain they thought the speaker was about the correctness of the probability phrase. Speakers were perceived as least certain when the verbal probability phrases were spoken with both prosodic uncertainty cues. Interpretation of verbal probability phrases varied widely across participants, especially when rising intonation was produced by the speaker. Overall, high probability phrases (e.g., "very likely") were estimated as lower (and low probability phrases, such as "unlikely," as higher) when they were uttered with a rising intonation. The effects of filled pauses were less pronounced, as were the uncertainty effects for medium probability phrases (e.g., "probable"). These results stress the importance of nonverbal communication when verbally communicating risks and probabilities to people, for example, in the context of doctor–patient communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mandarin Chinese, the space-time word “前/qian” isused to express both the spatial concept of front/forwardand the temporal concept of early/before (e.g., “前天/qian-tian”, literally front day, meaning the day before yesterday).This is consistent with the fact that Mandarin speakers cangesture to the front of the body to refer to a past event, andmore generally can have past-in-front space-time mappings.In Chinese Sign Languages, however, the spatialfront/forward and the temporal early/before are signeddifferently as the sign for spatial front is only used for thespatial concept of forward, and the sign for before/past isdirected to the back. In this study we investigate whetherthe Mandarin sagittal spatial metaphors for time influenceChinese deaf signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning. In twoexperiments, we found that Chinese deaf signers withhigher Mandarin proficiency were more likely to interpretthe Mandarin word “前/qian” as the temporal conception ofpast (Study 1), and to perform past-in-front space-timemappings (Study 2) as opposed to signers with lowerMandarin proficiency. The findings of the study not onlyprovide within-culture evidence for the influence oflanguage on thought, but also demonstrate that even cross-modal space-time metaphors can have an impact on deaf-signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning.

Recent research shows that Chinese, when they gestureabout time, tend to put the past “ahead” and the future“behind”. Do they think of time in the way as suggested bytheir gestures? In this study we investigate whether Chinesepeople explicitly have such past-in-front mappings. Inexperiment 1 we show that when time conceptions areconstructed with neutral wording (without spatialmetaphors), Chinese people are more likely to have a past-in-front-mapping than Spaniards. This could be due tocultural differences in temporal focus of attention, in thatChinese people are more past-oriented than Europeans.However, additional experiments (2 & 3) show that,independent of culture, Chinese people’s past-in-frontmapping is sensitive to the wording of sagittal spatialmetaphors. In comparison to a neutral condition, they havemore past-in-front mappings when time conceptions areconstructed with past-in-front spatial metaphors (“frontday”, means the day before yesterday), whereas fewer past-in-front mappings are constructed with future-in-frontmetaphors. There thus appear to be both long-term effectsof cultural attitudes on the spatialization of time, and alsoimmediate effects of the space-time metaphors used toprobe people’s mental representations.

Edioic responses abound in dialogues, where a speaker reuses a portion of the text uttered by another in a preceding turm, though semantically they contribute little if any new information. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of researchers from diverse academic fields, ranging from sociolinguistics and developmental psychology, to computational linguistics and human-computer interfaces. This study reports an empirical investigation on echoic responses from an informational perspective. Drawing on statistical analyses of instances extracted from corpora of spoken dialogues in Japanese, we show that echoic responses with different timings, lengths, intonations, pitches, and speeds signal different degrees in which the speakers have integrated the repeated information into their prior knowledge. We further consider dialogue-coordination functions enacted by this informational potential of echoic responses, and identify the function of display as distinguished from the functions of acknowledgment and repair-initiation.

In this article we report on two experiments about the perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech. The article addresses two questions: (1) how do visual cues from a speaker's face to emotion relate to auditory cues, and (2) what is the recognition speed for various facial cues to emotion? Both experiments reported below are based on tests with video clips of emotional utterances collected via a variant of the well-known Velten method. More specifically, we recorded speakers who displayed positive or negative emotions, which were congruent or incongruent with the (emotional) lexical content of the uttered sentence. In order to test this, we conducted two experiments. The first experiment is a perception experiment in which Czech participants, who do not speak Dutch, rate the perceived emotional state of Dutch speakers in a bimodal (audiovisual) or a unimodal (audio- or vision-only) condition. It was found that incongruent emotional speech leads to significantly more extreme perceived emotion scores than congruent emotional speech, where the difference between congruent and incongruent emotional speech is larger for the negative than for the positive conditions. Interestingly, the largest overall differences between congruent and incongruent emotions were found for the audio-only condition, which suggests that posing an incongruent emotion has a particularly strong effect on the spoken realization of emotions. (Contains 3 tables, 7 figures, and 7 footnotes.)