Three questionnaire studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs) such as "I really liked the preface of the book that I read yesterday." These complex NPs are ambiguous between two readings, one in which the relative clause (RC) that I read yesterday modifies the first noun, N1, preface, or the second noun, N2, book. Cuetos and Mitchell (Cognition, 1988, 30, 73-105) claimed that Spanish was biased toward having the RC modify N1, which they claimed was evidence against the cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. We demonstrate that the preference for N1 versus N2 modification varies greatly between different construction types within both Spanish and English while the variation between languages is relatively minor, but still of interest. The effect cannot be reduced to an effect of plausibility, but seems to reflect directly certain syntactic and semantic aspects of the constructions studied. We claim that relative clauses and other "nonprimary" phrases are not parsed following such parsing principles as late closure, but instead follow principles we advance in the form of the construal hypothesis. Thus, it is not the case that late closure is a language-specific strategy; rather, it and similar structural parsing principles are specific to only certain classes of phrases within a language.

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up-bad is down and good is right-bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants' hands while responding to the task-regardless of the location of their dominant hand-facilitates the judgment of positive and negative-valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor-congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.

Los problemas que presentan los modelos neuronales de procesamiento del lenguajey la representación del significado derivan de dos problemas principales: el problema del ‘binding’ y el problema de la composicionalidad. A su vez estos dos problemas derivan del problema de cómo representar estímulos complejos con estructura interna, como son las oraciones, mediante vectores de activación. En este artículo presentamos un modelo neuronal de procesamiento de lenguaje (ANNLP) que resuelve estos dos problemas y cuyo rendimiento es muy eficiente procesando textos reales para un amplio abanico de tareas que incluyen la desambiguación del sentido en contextos proposicionales, la desambiguación sintáctica y el parsing. Para conseguir este nivel de eficiencia hemos tenido que dotar al modelo de un conjunto de características cuyo elemento central reside en la propuesta de cómo computar estructura (estructura sintáctica y de significado) mediante vectores de activación. Se aporta evidencia a favor de que el modelo y en concreto la propuesta de cómo representar estructura no es una simple solución ingenierila los problemas del binding y la composicionalidad, sino que es plausible psicológicamente.

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riya20 Thinking for speaking: the expression of motion events by Russian and Chinese learners of Catalan as a second language / Pensar para hablar: la expresión de eventos de movimiento en hablantes nativos de ruso y mandarín que aprenden catalán como una segunda lengua To cite this article: Montserrat Cortès-Colomé & Elizabeth Gilboy (2014) Thinking for speaking: the expression of motion events by Russian and Chinese learners of Catalan as a second language / Pensar para hablar: la expresión de eventos de movimiento en hablantes nativos de ruso y mandarín que aprenden catalán como una segunda lengua, Infancia y Aprendizaje: Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 37:3,