Abstract. This chapter discusses some aspects concerning the cognitive status of pauses in research on discourse production. It starts with a concise review of some of the 'canonical' studies on langnage production in which the pause analytical methodology is adopted. Section 2 discusses methods of collecting pause data and constructing pause databases. Section 3 addresses one key issue: The empirical status of pauses. First, it is shown that the relation between pauses and cognitive processes in discourse production can be maintained by looking at what happens in the immediate neighbourhood of pauses. Based on an analysis of actual transcripts, four kinds of pauses are distinguished: Pauses signalling retrieving, pauses signalling monitoring and pauses signalling repairing processes. Secondly, this section discusses how pause time variances can be interpreted in terms of underognitive processes, and the section concludes with a discussion of how pauses are related to text structural characteristics. The fourth section discusses various statistical methods for analysing pause data, showing the kind of research questions that can be addressed by each method.

Emoji have become a prominent part of interactive digital communication. Here, we ask the questions: does a grammatical system govern the way people use emoji; and how do emoji interact with the grammar of written text? We conducted two experiments that asked participants to have a digital conversation with each other using only emoji (Experiment 1) or to substitute at least one emoji for a word in the sentences (Experiment 2). First, we found that the emoji-only utterances of participants remained at simplistic levels of patterning, primarily appearing as one-unit utterances (as formulaic expressions or responsive emotions) or as linear sequencing (for example, repeating the same emoji or providing an unordered list of semantically related emoji). Emoji playing grammatical roles (i.e., ‘parts-of-speech’) were minimal, and showed little consistency in ‘word order’. Second, emoji were substituted more for nouns and adjectives than verbs, while also typically conveying nonredundant information to the sentences. These findings suggest that, while emoji may follow tendencies in their interactions with grammatical structure in multimodal text-emoji productions, they lack grammatical structure on their own.

This article identifies the structural and conceptual aspects of a visual construction often used in advertisements to establish a metaphoric or associative relation, that is, symmetric object alignment (SOA). It offers an account of the formal ingredients of SOA, which fall into two groups: objectconstitutive factors (like size, shape, and color) and object-depictment factors (like perspective, orientation, and distance from viewing point). Both factors allow us to treat SOA as a visual rhetorical scheme. We also discuss how SOA relates to conceptual structure, metaphoric or otherwise. Four types of relations are distinguished, based on the way in which perceptual and conceptual characteristics interact. Finally, we discuss the way in which these characteristics relate to the processing of such visual messages. One depictment factor will be focused on in particular: one-to-one versus one-to-many alignments. An attempt is made to connect these 2 patterns to the much-discussed topic in verbal metaphor theory, object comparison versus categorization.

Comparing objects is a process necessary to cognitive tasks involving categorization. Shape is considered one of the primary vehicles for object categorization. We hypothesize that similarity in shape facilitates finding conceptual correspondences between objects, both for objects stemming from the same and from different conceptual categories. In the latter case, the comparison process requires the construction of an ad hoc category, which is also required when interpreting visual metaphors. We used three experimental tasks to investigate the role of shape in comparing objects: a similarity judgment task, a similarity rating task, and a production task. The results of our experiments support the hypothesis that an essential component of visual metaphor processing-comparing objects stemming from disparate conceptual domains-is positively affected by similarity in the objects' shape.

We investigated the relationship between familiarity, perceived ease of use, and attractiveness of graph designs in two target groups: experts and laymen in design. In the first study, we presented them with a variety of more or less common graph designs and asked them without any additional task to evaluate their familiarity, attractiveness, and perceived ease of use. They judged the familiarity and ease of use of the graphs similarly, but they differed in their attractiveness judgments. Familiarity and perceived ease of use appeared to predict attractiveness, but stronger for laymen than for designers. Laymen are attracted to designs they perceive as familiar and easy to use. Designers are attracted to designs between familiar and novel. In the second study, we asked designers and laymen to first perform an information retrieval task with the same graphs and then rate their attractiveness. Laymen’s appreciations remained the same, but the designers’ judgments of attractiveness were different from those in study 1. Correlational analyses suggest that their attractiveness judgments after use were affected not by actual usability but by perceived ease of use of the graphs.