Abstract:To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception.

The mechanisms underlying language production are often assumed to be universal, and hence not contingent on a speaker's language. This assumption is problematic for at least two reasons. Given the typological diversity of the world's languages, only a small subset of languages has actually been studied psycholinguistically. And, in some cases, these investigations have returned results that at least superficially raise doubt about the assumption of universal production mechanisms. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the need for more psycholinguistic work on a typologically more diverse set of languages. We summarize cross-linguistic work on sentence production (specifically: grammatical encoding), focusing on examples where such work has improved our theoretical understanding beyond what studies on English alone could have achieved. But cross-linguistic research has much to offer beyond the testing of existing hypotheses: it can guide the development of theories by revealing the full extent of the human ability to produce language structures. We discuss the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations, and close with a remark on the impact of language endangerment on psycholinguistic research on understudied languages.

The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation

Understanding of evidentials is incomplete without consideration of their behaviour in interrogative contexts. We discuss key formal, semantic, and pragmatic features of cross-linguistic variation concerning the use of evidential markers in interrogative clauses. Cross-linguistic data suggest that an exclusively speaker-centric view of evidentiality is not sufficient to explain the semantics of information source marking, as in many languages it is typical for evidentials in questions to represent addressee perspective. Comparison of evidentiality and the related phenomenon of egophoricity emphasises how knowledge-based linguistic systems reflect attention to the way knowledge is distributed among participants in the speech situatio

Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorising is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience devoted to the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The papers in this issue draw on data from a variety of genetically and areally divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. To contextualise these studies, we provide an overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorising

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as illustrating other meanings and functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction.

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a b st r a c t Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative effi ciency, i.e., an effi cient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative effi ciency hypothesis by investigating speakers' preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we fi nd that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative effi ciency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare[ * ] We thank Serapio Canul Dzib for Yucatec Maya language consulting and for assistance in preparing, translating, and recording experimental stimuli; Marcelina Chan, Miguel Sosoya, José Cipriano Dzib Uitzil, and Lorena Pool Balam for transcribing the Yucatec data; Andrew Watts for programming assistance; and Juergen Bohnemeyer for sharing his knowledge of and insights into Yucatec grammar with us. We are also very grateful to Mtra. Leyla Gisela Leo Peraza and Ddra. Graciela Cortés Camarillo at the Universidad de Oriente (UNO), for their offi cial support of the project, and to Betsy Kraft and Marta Beatriz Poot Nahuat for their invaluable assistance with participant recruiting and administration. Finally, our thanks to all the students at the UNO who took part in our experiment. This work was partially funded through National Science Foundation grants BCS-0848353 and CAREER IIS-1150028 to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the National Science Foundation. Address for correspondence: Elisabeth Norcliff e, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: elisabeth.norcliff e@mpi.nl nor cliffe and jaeger 168 two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specifi c to Yucatec. We fi nd that Yucatec speakers' preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specifi c realizations.