فصلنامه تازه های علوم شناختی
سال بیست و پنجم شماره 1 (پیاپی 97، Spring 2023)

From its inception, cognitive linguistics has been characterized by several shared basic commitments, most notably the “generalization commitment” and the “cognitive commitment” (Lakoff, 1990). These are instances of the general model of scientific explanation, which comprises reduction and emergence as two sides of the same coin. An explanation must show a) that a complex phenomenon can be analyzed as resulting from (i.e., as reducible to) the interaction of certain simpler phenomena under certain conditions, and by the same token, and b) that the special properties of the complex phenomenon, while not present in the basic phenomena involved, emerge from this interaction. For language, with its special cognitive and communicative features, this conception of explanation entails a biological commitment and poses a challenge. How can we show that these special features emerge from more basic biological phenomena? Since the theory of evolution provides the unifying conceptual framework for answering such questions, an indispensable component of the answer is an account of the evolution of these features, and given the diversity of languages, cultural evolution will have to be part of that account. The biological commitment entails employing the generally accepted model specifically for explanation in biology known as “Tinbergen’s four questions” (Tinbergen, 1963; Bateson & Laland, 2013). This study will show that these various elementary requirements can be met in an illuminating way. In addition, it will explore how this might provide an opportunity for overcoming some long-lasting controversies in linguistics.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), proposed by George Lakoff et al., refers to understanding one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. Conceptual metaphor is crucial in the organization of human experience and abstract thinking. CMT has been used as a framework to form interdisciplinary studies. Thus the theory has been expanded through different fields and formed new approaches to analyze old problems in various disciplines such as literature, psychology, and alike. However, this lecture focused on a few methodological restrictions of CMT, such as using limited examples from English, mainly based on intuition, being inattentive to linguistic data from other language families, and restricted use of corpus-based studies. In addition to those methodological restrictions, terminological and conceptual challenges reduce the precision of analyses within this framework. Borders between conceptual metaphor and terms and concepts such as the following are widely uncertain: perception verbs polysemy, metonymy, physiological metaphors of emotion, and synesthesia. The data to show these terminological challenges have been gathered through long-term research on Persian Language Data Base (PLDB) and Persian language literature prose and poetry.

This research aims to illustrate the rate of hopelessness and hopefulness over the past five decades (the 1970s up until the 2010s) in Iranian society since it is widely believed that Iranians have become much more hopeless nowadays compared to the past. Therefore, the question “Has Iranian society become more hopeless through time from a scientific point of view?” is imprinted in the minds of Iranians and researchers. In a sense, language reflects the human mind and society; consequently, the reflection of one’s emotions, such as hope in language, is conspicuous. As emotions are often abstract concepts, a language mostly uses conceptual metaphors to make them more tangible for man. A set of correspondences exist between a more physical source and an abstract domain. In this study, the rate of conceptual metaphors referring to hopelessness and hopefulness and the cognitive pattern regarding hope in Iranian society is investigated in the selected corpus of best-selling movies from each decade, in which six movies and a total of thirty. The findings illustrate that hopefulness is observable to a small extent in society only in the 70s and 90s. However, the greatest hopelessness in Iranian society was experienced in the 2000s and 2010s. Furthermore, the most frequent source domain of hopelessness conceptualization is “inability”; for hopefulness, it is “dynamism.” This study concluded that Iranians are increasingly more hopeless over time, particularly in the last two decades, from a cognitive point of view

Color conceptualization, variations, and the analysis of continuity or discreteness in color terms are worth more deeply studying. Hence, Persian speakers and their lexical choices were analyzed in this paper. The researcher has proposed a computational measure for lexical variation (LVM) and a sequence for continuity (CDC) in color terms. The hypotheses are 1) If “variation” was mere “distinction” or “difference,” no new term would have been coined for the concept. Hence, studying lexical variation with a cognitive approach is studying “the relationship between the similarities and differences of lexical choices.” 2) Lexical variation in color terms can be represented and analyzed by applying quantitative approaches and defining computational measures such as LVM. 3) Continuity or discreteness of color terms can be represented and analyzed by CDC sequence. For this study, a survey test was designed and conducted on 100 individuals, and a 13200-entry corpus of Persian color terms was created. The theoretical framework is Cognitive Semantics and Cognitive Variational Linguistics. Methodologically, the research is partly a survey, library, and descriptive-analytical study. LVM can be used to compute onomasiological or semasiological salience and find each category’s prototypes. Furthermore, it is illustrated in the CDC sequence that referents (all possible colors) are continuous, conceptualizations (color terms) are discrete, and the probability that each of the conceptualizations happens (the salience of each color term) is continuous. All three hypotheses have been confirmed.

Raised brows are important grammatical facial markers in relative clause (RC) constructions in Iranian Sign Language (Zaban Eshareh Irani: ZEI, aka Esharani). RC constructions can be characterized as manifestations of a reference-point relationship in language. A reference-point relationship allows for a sequential scanning mental process by which an activated entity in the first conceptual domain is the reference point to lead the conceptualizer to a target. Activation of the nominal head as the reference point in the RC is marked by raised eyebrows which are held through the entire relative clause. Relative clauses are part of a larger conceptual context, the matrix clause. The trajector or landmark of one process functions as the trajector or landmark of another process, and the two processes together need to be comprehended as a whole. Thus, the grounded nominal expression in RC construction has a dual grammatical role in the utterance. In the first phase, an entity becomes accessible via an event. In the second phase, a second event is accessible via the same entity. The eyebrows raising and returning to their neutral position indicate the boundary between the two phases. In this way, the relative clause and the main clause are construed to be in relation to one another.

With the emergence of electronic dictionaries and due to the inadequacies of existing Persian dictionaries, a scientific and theory-based approach is required in lexicography. One of the most important problems in lexicography is arranging entries, including lexical items (words and groups of words) and their equivalents, in a useful way to dictionary users. The current study aims to organize idioms and proverbs in a non-linear and non-alphabetical way. The following research questions were proposed to achieve the purpose of the study: 1. Based on the Cognitive Semantics approach, how can we describe and arrange idioms and proverbs? 2. How can applying the mechanisms and theories of Cognitive Semantics help lexicographers in the lemmatization of idioms and proverbs? To do this, based on the descriptive-analytical method and Cognitive Semantics approach and its concepts, such as conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and conventional knowledge, the authors have examined the data extracted from the Sokhan two-volume Persian dictionary, two-volume Proverbial dictionary, Famous Iranian Proverbs and internet resources. The results indicated that by presenting metaphoric and metonymic idioms and proverbs in dictionaries, and based on the conventional knowledge of the language speakers, considering the semantic motivation and according to the concept of target domain of these expressions, a non-linear and non-alphabetical way can be proposed for arranging idioms and proverbs and their equivalents.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory has long studied only verbal manifestations of conceptual metaphor, while metaphor is not a figure of speech but a mode of thought. The visual modality is the most important of the various modes that the medium of film can recruit, including visuals, music, sound, and language. Furthermore, metonymy plays an important role in the formation of metaphorical conceptualizations. This study analyzed The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore based on Cognitive Semiotics. All the scenes were evaluated in terms of metaphors and metonymies related to the animation’s main theme, i.e., reading books enhances public awareness. This animation has several mega-metaphors, micro-metaphors as well as metonymies. The mega-metaphor GOOD IS LIGHT/ BAD IS DARK leads to KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT/ IGNORANCE IS DARK micro-metaphor. Additionally, the Great Chain of Being and the Event Structure mega-metaphors are represented according to which HUMAN BEING IS BOOK and CHANGE IS MOVEMENT are their micro-metaphors, respectively. The last mega-metaphor pair is GOOD IS UP/ BAD IS DOWN, with HAPPINESS IS UP/ SADNESS IS DOWN, besides KNOWLEDGE IS UP/ IGNORANCE IS DOWN as its multimodal micro-metaphors, according to a combination of visuals, music, and written language. Finally, EFFECT FOR CAUSE, along with POSSESSED FOR POSSESSOR, are attributed to metonymy. Thus, it can be concluded that metaphor and metonymy are not emanated from the human cognitive system but are eminently usable in films.

The Persian preposition /bærɑje/ (“for”) can encode many relationships, such as intention, cause, equivalence, and possession. This study aims to show that using this preposition in the different domains has semantic significance, which an analysis within the framework of Cognitive Grammar can help bring out. The data for this study have been gathered from written Persian texts, the Dehkhoda dictionary [Loqatname-y-e Dehkhoda], the great Sokhan dictionary [Farhang-e Bozorg-e Sokhan], and daily Persian conversations. They were analyzed using the polysemy network introduced by Tyler & Evans. The results showed that the /bærɑje/ preposition has multiple senses, creating a radial network. These senses are systematically derived from the “intention” sense, which will be considered the prototypical sense of the preposition. The other senses are: “Cause,” “Possession,” “Equivalence,” “Benefit,” “Recipient,” “Duration,” and “Destination.” This study concludes that applying a semantic description to study prepositions yields clear results. The different senses of /bærɑje/ can be categorized into groups that form a coherent radial network structure, in which a prototypical schema can be identified. All the different schemas are related to one another. Image schemas can capture the meanings of this preposition. Finally, the use of radial networks provides a convenient means of accounting for the phenomenon of polysemy, further demonstrating the usefulness of the Cognitive Linguistics framework.

This study explores how Persian speakers think and talk about boredom. By examining linguistic expressions of boredom extracted from the Dadegan Corpus and the Google Search engine, the study sheds some light on how and using which figurative devices the emotion of the concept of boredom is understood in Persian. The analysis shows that the concept of boredom is conceptualized in Persian through metaphor, metonymy, and the interaction between metaphor and metonymy, i.e., metaphtonymy. Analyzing metaphoric expressions reveals that fifteen distinctive source concepts in Persian characterize boredom. Among these, the conceptualization of boredom as death, insanity, illness, and a container are the four most frequent metaphors in the data. A close analysis of metonymic expressions indicates that metonymic conceptualizations of boredom in Persian are specific elaborations of two common metonymic principles: the physiological effects of an emotion stand for the emotion, and the behavioral reactions of an emotion stand for the emotion. More importantly, the findings suggest that not only realistic physiological effects and behavioral reactions but also metaphorical physiological effects and behavioral reactions of boredom can stand for the emotion, i.e., boredom, in Persian. Those conceptualizations of boredom, special cases of metaphorical physiological effects/behavioral reactions, provide a clear example of the interaction between metaphor and metonymy, i.e., metaphtonymy.

This presentation will introduce the state-of-the-art in Biolinguistics, and the philosophical, theoretical, and descriptive issues that challenge Biolinguistics’s foundations will be mentioned. The current study will benefit from the author’s published articles both in English and Persian and his books published and in press in  Persian to discuss the following topics : (a)  Left periphery in the Minimalist Program and its implications for the theory of language in general and syntax- pragmatics interface in particular, (b) Word order/ constituent order peculiarities of Ancient, Middle, and Modern Iranian Languages undermine the current assumptions in Biolinguistics, and (c) Split alignment is a hallmark of the majority of the Iranian Languages ( past and present). The most common grammatical tool to encode some grammatical functions in these languages is Indexation/agreement. In these languages, three syntactic domains have been grammaticalized (the CP- domain, the VP- domain, and the PP+ V- domain) to host the pronominal clitics, which index the grammatical subject of past tense (transitive) verbs. This topic is interesting because the pronominal clitics are mobile within the relevant syntactic domain, which is grammaticalized by a particular language. Their mobility is sensitive to Information Structure, most specifically focus marking. This study will argue that these observations suggest a strong interdependence (not merely interface) between the syntax module and the information structure, namely the pragmatics module. This presentation will benefit from the findings in items (a)-(c) to argue in favor of a model of language with philosophical, theoretical, and analytic underpinnings which the Biolinguistics Program is not equipped with.

Consonant and vowel categories, differing in distinctive features, interact into projected syllables. Noun and verb categories, also differing in distinctive (categorial) features, interact into projected phrases. Phrases to categorize (via featural distinctions of the A/A’, head/maxP sort) and interact into chains, thus regarded as super-projected structures. What is less obvious is whether these distinctions - cutting across levels of analysis (phonology, phrasal syntax, representations with semantic consequences) - are equivalent. The question is open if such distinctions stem from an underlying algebraic base. This study explores how fundamental features are correlated variables in Fourier analysis: a narrower localization in time (relevant for consonants) entails a less accurate frequency representation (relevant for vowels direction) - and vice-versa. This simple idea may generalize to subcases involving the projection of lexical characteristics and displacement after that (chains), which can be achieved by taking predicate representations as probability waves associated with the degree to which a given predicate obtains, which creates a formal situation arguably analyzable in Fourier terms. Then nothing prevents an equivalent move to the realm of chains, where what is linked are portions in a phrase-marker under relevant structural conditions, resulting in distributed representations (chains) that may collapse into observables at the point of phonological (linearized) or semantic (concretized) representations. This approach directly affects the distinction between tokens and occurrences of category types: one can have a distributed (wave-like) or punctual (measurable) representation, not both.

To make an understatement, the concept of “computation” is multifaceted. “Computation” in syntax, cognitive science, and computer science often receives drastically different definitions, sometimes at direct odds with each other. Are we defining closed input-output mappings over natural? Are we integrating information from multiple sources interactively? What are the basic ingredients in a definition of “computation” such that we can say that a digital computer and a human are doing it? This talk will examine some aspects of the relation between what “computation” looks like in the theory of syntax and some aspects of neurocognition and computer science and try to establish to what extent these approaches deal with the same process. Asking these questions is important to bridge the gap between syntactic theory (which is concerned with providing empirically adequate structural descriptions for natural language sentences) and cognitive neuroscience (concerned with the neurocognitive underpinnings of what goes on in language production and processing). Building on the distinction between emulation and simulation, of long pedigree in computer science and AI research, we will focus on the basic properties of syntactic computation, analyze what we should require of a descriptively adequate grammar, and whether a correspondence with neurocognitive processes is not only possible but even desirable.

The only prominent molecular biologist who likened nucleotides to phonemes was Fr. Jacob, probably influenced by his interlocutor, Roman Jakobson. Phoneme, unlike sound, is an element of the language system and is defined as a minimal set of distinctive features. Extrapolation of this methodology to the genetic code (GC) leads to a distinction between a nucleotide as a biochemical element and a nucleotide as an intra-system abstract unit. The differences between nucleotides can be represented as two pairs of binary oppositions based on two distinctive features: the number of carbon ring bases (two vs. one); the number of hydrogen bonds:  three (G; C) or two (A, T/U). These are the differential features that can be considered the minimal units of the GC. Their ontology is determined by intra-system encoding and decoding operations.The GC may be represented as a superposition of two coding systems:  (a) quasi-triplet (32 codons can be represented as “doublet + comma” when the third position separates triplets from each other); and (b)semi-triplet - 30 codons are coded according to the principle: “doublet+ purine” or “doublet + pyrimidine.” The proper triplet coding is observed only in two codons encoding tryptophan and methionine when all three positions are relevant. One can find the gradation of coding complexity: quasi-triplet; semi-triplet; proper triplet, and context-dependent triplet (methionine/start-codon).

Matrix syntax is a model of syntactic relations in language which grew out of a desire to understand chains (Martin, Orús, Uriagereka 2019). In MS, syntax acts on a Hilbert space, and sentences are modeled as vectors in a Hilbert space with a tensor product structure built from 2x2 matrices. A chain is also a linguistic version of Schrödinger’s cat, based on the equally-weighted superposition of two (orthogonal) vectors in a Hilbert space. It is there as the system has to compress the dimensionality resulting from tensorization taking 2x2 matrices to 4x4. The present study argues that the tensorization, as mentioned earlier, results from an operation called General Merge, and the workspaces in the system are updated through an operation called Special Merge. In order to investigate the said claim, this research inspect a dozen axioms in MS, with special emphasis on axioms 3 and 4. It also seems reasonable to believe that General and Special Merge are better candidates than Chomsky’s recent reformulation of Merge to MERGE (2019). This study assumes here the minimalist research program, which is arguably well-motivated in terms of learnability and the evolutionary concerns one may have on the very limited evidence of the origins of UG. This work also attempts to provide an MS framework within which (A and A’) chain movements, copies, repetitions, and occurrences are investigated, which will be done by meticulously examining the phenomena in Persian and English. This study attempts to show how General and Special Merge do not allow other extensions like Parallel and Sidewards Merge to surface.

Many context effects in language comprehension appear at the earliest point in time – closely temporally coordinated with when context effects could emerge in line with interactive accounts of language processing; some context effects may even resemble preferences and override the short-term frequency of experience via language input. However, variability in the timing and robustness of context effects shines through when we look at contextual relations that are indirect and likely accessed via inferences or where knowledge may be variable (for instance, due to age differences or differences in language background). This talk discusses (accommodating) variability in context effects on language comprehension.

According to the theory of processing approach to grammar developed by Hawkins (1994; 2004), the grammaticalization of any structure in languages is grounded in processing considerations suggesting that any phenomena in language seem inclined towards easing the processing burden. From this perspective, any rearrangements in the constituency in general and long-distance dependencies, in particular, are not implemented haphazardly. The operation of that part of the linguistic representation system that leads to the formulation of concepts is governed by processing mechanisms. As Hawkins postulates, the processing mechanisms make it possible for humans to comprehend (and produce) grammatical structures rapidly and efficiently. The formulator in the language production model is also planned in a way that minimizes the processing load. Therefore, it appears that constituent ordering and reordering (syntactic movement), grammatical constraints in word order, and any syntactic phenomenon are motivated by the flawless performance of human linguistic processors and driven by the incentive of increasing processing efficiency. Given that this mechanism favors the presence of some orderings and the rarity of others, some syntactic phenomena, such as dislocation of the head and dependent adjacency, should not be interpreted as a violation of a tendency known as a continuous dependency. However, it is certainly meant to fulfill some processing motivation. As eye behavior analysis can be a window onto the realization of real-time cognitive processing, drawing upon data collected from eye tracker, the presentation aims to address how processing principles are grammaticalized in Persian concerning long-distance dependencies and syntactic movement.

Recent empirical evidence has shown several correlations between language and musical rhythm processing in typical and atypical populations. One important line of research has proposed that musical rhythm and language processing involve the internal construction of hierarchical sequences, i.e., ordered collections of unique elements that can be represented in a structure in which lower-level units are combined into higher-level constituents. The present study hypothesized that a domain-general cognitive system responsible for internal hierarchical structure building constitutes a key shared mechanism between musical rhythm and language processing. In two experiments, typical French-speaking adults listened to thirty-two-second structurally regular or irregular rhythmic primes before completing six-sentence blocks of a grammaticality judgment task on Jabberwocky sentences. In both experiments, rhythmic priming influenced syntactic processing only in the first three sentences after a prime. Interestingly, participants with better rhythm discrimination abilities seemed to show less of a priming effect, while those with better auditory attention benefited more from the presence of a regular prime. These findings provide further evidence for a domain-general cognitive network responsible for hierarchical structure building in musical rhythm and language. Furthermore, our data seem to showcase that, in typical adults processing Jabberwocky sentences, the rhythmic priming effect comprises at least two components: a short-term facilitatory effect of regular rhythmic stimulation and an inhibitory effect of irregular rhythmic priming.

Understanding parental knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding children’s developmental milestones is essential. Similarly, it is vital to know what parents think about their children’s communication, language, speech, and swallowing. Consequently, designing a questionnaire to obtain this information was necessary. This study reports the process of questionnaire preparation and publishes data about parents’ information—the preparation steps involved designing the questionnaire’s initial version by articles. Experts prepared pre-test versions of relevant items. Next, pre-test version content validity was assessed by the Lauche method in collaboration with ten experts. Then, impact factors were evaluated by 15 parents. Finally, 150 participants completed the pre-test questionnaire. Twenty-six parents evaluated the test-retest reliability score. The final version was tested on 267 parents. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to analyze the data. Through discussion sessions, irrelevant items were removed. Consequently, fifty-two items remained, and due to face validity scores, none received less than 1.5 points. Therefore, this version was conducted as a trial version. Cronbach’s alpha for the study was 0.74, and test-retest reliability was 0.85. Analysis revealed a non-normal distribution with a P-value of less than 0.05. Knowledge levels averaged 9.5, attitudes averaged 74.5, and practice levels averaged 57. Considering validity and reliability scores, the questionnaire is beneficial for assessing parents’ K.A.P. regarding developmental milestones. Using this questionnaire, therapists can recommend parents who are uncertain about their child’s milestones that the parents’ knowledge of these developmental skills is higher than average, but they did not practice them according to scientific facts.

Vocabulary recognition and processing have always been a topic of interest to many psycholinguists. People can perform differently during this process under the influence of different factors. Regularity is one of these influential factors that, in the present study, is investigated from the perspective of Goswami and Bryant (2016) in recognizing Persian homophonic words in Gilak-Fars children. Research data were collected through a researcher-made “reading test” from fifty students in schools of Rasht and Lahijan. After analyzing them, it was observed that the words’ regularity significantly caused different performances in children’s recognition of homophonic words, and they performed weaker in reading irregular homophones than in regular ones. The reason for this different performance can be due to Persian’s orthographic features, which causes their lack of ability to apply the correct sound to some letters of the words.

A central feature of human cognition is the ability to rapidly and effectively link incoming sensory information to knowledge stored in long-term memory.  Work using temporally sensitive measures, such as event-related brain potentials (ERPs), has revealed the critical import of time and context for meaning processing. In particular, compelling evidence shows that language processing can be facilitated by expectations for semantic, lexical, and sensory features of likely upcoming words. This ability to actively use context information to predict features of likely upcoming words uses left hemisphere mechanisms shared with language production. However, we have also found that prediction and comprehension generally change throughout normal aging. Emerging data show that aging is associated with changes in how information accrues over time, how context shapes word processing, and how the brain responds to unexpected language events. In turn, these age-related changes affect how comprehension unfolds at the moment and what people later remember about what they have experienced and understood. Taken together, data from across the lifespan reveal that multiple language comprehension mechanisms are implemented in parallel and that the brain dynamically adapts its use of these mechanisms, both over the long-term, in response to changing neural and cognitive abilities with age, and over the short-term, in response to situational and task demands. These findings reveal the complex relations among sensory processing, attention, memory, and control systems that allow people to rapidly and fluidly understand one another across the lifespan.

A core assumption of classic linguistics —the arbitrariness of the sign— states that the sound of a word per se has no inherent semantic content, nor does it play any role in shaping the meaning of words. However, a growing body of work has provided evidence that the sound of a word can carry subtle cues to its meaning and that sound-meaning association in vocabulary is a general property of human language, which plays a crucial role for both phylogenetic language evolution and ontogenetic language development. In the affective domain, recent empirical results suggest how a word sounds (e.g., soft vs. harsh) can convey affective information (e.g., pleasantness vs. harshness), which can interact with the words’ semantic content. This talk focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of sound-meaning associations in the affective domain, termed “affective iconicity.” This study will present results that address the two main questions i) Does the sound of words (i.e., phonemes, acoustic features) evoke affective responses observable at the behavioral and neural levels? ii) Does the sound of words influence the processes of meaning-making and semantic decisions in the affective domain? The results of these studies were used to upgrade the standard models of language processing by conceiving corresponding modules responsible for the interactive effect of sound and meaning during the affective evaluation of words.

The grammatical aspect expresses information about the temporal contours of an event. Important differences exist between English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) aspectual systems. English shows considerable flexibility in the distribution of aspectual forms – different forms can convey one aspectual meaning, which is not the case with the BCS aspect. This study investigated whether grammatical aspect violations are processed similarly in BCS and English (Flecken et al., 2015). In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, we studied BCS’s electrophysiological responses to aspectual violations. Participants read sentences with and without aspectual violations in a word-by-word presentation in the center of the screen. In the ERP experiment, aspectual violations in BCS resulted in a positivity (P600) in the 600-800 ms and 800-1000 ms time windows and in central and posterior regions absent in sentences without aspectual violations. The different ERP components show differences in processing aspectual violations in BCS and English: P600 for aspectual violations in BCS (present study) and short early negativity (250-350 ms; Flecken et al., 2015) for those in English. The robust P600 suggests that the parser immediately detects the incongruity between the aspectual feature on the verb and the time frame of the sentence in BCS. The parser might not detect aspectual violations in English if such forms have secondary aspectual meanings compatible with the sentence’s time frame.

Recently, test developers and psychometricians have voiced concern over understanding/improving the language tests’ psychometric qualities and brain cognition. The present study aimed to scrutinize the probable interconnection between cognitive load and vocabulary test items’ difficulty estimates. To collect more profound data, the researchers employed a neuro-imaging/brain-scanning approach (via electroencephalography, EEG) on twelve high-school students (age range: 16-18) (i.e., four participants for each proficiency level: elementary, intermediate, and advanced). The researchers used a 21-channel EEG system (Mitsar-EEG-202-1, Russia) in a cognitive-laboratory (ATU) setting. The empirical data were collected via Cambridge Placement Test (CPT) and the international Vocabulary Size Test (140 items) (VST) (1), taken by all participants (selected via purposive sampling from among 60 high-school students) in a face-to-face setting. EEG was applied to right-handed students with no seizure history or head trauma. The data were analyzed through ANOVA and some t-tests to scrutinize the cognitive load imposed by VST. The current case study/brain-scanning quantitative research was conducted with the approval of the Ethics Committee in Biomedical Research of ATU with the approved code of IR.ATU.REC.1400.037. The obtained results demonstrated that EEG as a trustable indicator of cognitive load showed a noticeable difference between the elementary and intermediate levels in theta, beta, delta, and gamma powers, which were observed in all channels. Overall, this study provided some insights into students’ cognitive load and VST, based on a model of the human brain’s architecture and measuring students’ cognition by brain-scanning technique.

This study investigates the acquisition of negation by children simultaneously acquiring a double negation and a negative concord language. Natural languages are divided into two groups based on the ways of expression of negation. One group is of double negation languages, which explicitly allows using one negative element per clause to express sentential negation. The second group, the negative concord languages group, allows more than one negative element to express a single semantic negation. Following Zeijlstra’s (2004 et seq.) hypothesis for identifying the ways of expressing negation, this study will investigate the data of children acquiring Dutch, a double negation, and Italian, a negative concord language, and receiving input for both of them from their caregivers simultaneously. Results show that children acquire both negation systems simultaneously, and their brains can easily comprehend both. No effect was found for one of the negation systems over the other. We argue that bilingual children acquire Dutch and Italian simultaneously as their L1s and do not mix the grammar of both of their languages. Furthermore, their acquisition of negation is similar to their respective monolingual peers. It is concluded that children’s brains can simultaneously process two grammars for two different negation systems.

Neuro-linguistics programming (NLP) represents the input and output process of information. Furthermore, the psychology of language is fundamental to an understanding of what the NLP model represents. Also, in the 20th century, a new style of literature emerged as absurd literature. In this style, the writers have expressed thoughts of aimlessness, emptiness, isolation, loneliness, and death thoughts. For example, Samuel Beckett, one of the authors of the mentioned style, has dealt with this style in works such as “Waiting for Godot.” In this research, the qualitative method was used. In addition, an attempt was made to examine the effect of meaningless literature on the audience’s attitude. To investigate this issue, themes of “Waiting for Godot” were studied from literature websites such as “www.shmoop.com,” “www.askliterature.com,” “www.msmsol.com,” and “www.literary-articles.com.” The research results showed that in his work, many negative themes were used in “Waiting for Godot.” In conclusion, based on the NLP model, negative themes as negative events create a negative internal representation. Then, the negative internal representation creates a negative state of mind and negative behaviors in the audience of absurd literature. So, the audience should be aware of the influence of absurd literature when studying works of this style.

The present talk investigates the availability of grammatical-category information during bilingual language processing. The specific aim was to examine the processing of bilingual compound verbs (BCVs). BCV is formed when an item from the other language of bilinguals replaces the nominal constituent of a compound verb. The current study used the picture-word interference paradigm. It will address how a lexical element corresponding to a verb node can be placed in a slot corresponding to a noun lemma. This study examined whether, in the case of the production of BCVs, English verbs compete with the corresponding Persian compound verbs as a whole or whether English verbs compete with the nominal constituents of Persian compound verbs only. It will also investigate how the production of BCVs might be captured within a model of BCVs and how such a model may be integrated with the incremental network models of speech production. Naming latencies were longer in the nominal than the compound verb linguistic unit. Participants were slower to produce the nominal constituent of compound verbs in the context of a semantically closely related English distractor verb compared to producing the whole compound verbs in the context of a semantically closely related English distractor verb. The results revealed that in the case of the production of the nominal constituent of BCVs, a verb from the other language of bilinguals competes with a noun from the base language, suggesting that grammatical category does not provide a constraint on lexical access during the production of the nominal constituent of BCVs.

The impact of bilingualism on cognitive and emotional processing is the topic of recent psycholinguists & Educational Psychologists’ studies. Bilingualism researchers (Harris, 2020; Kazanas & Altarriba, 2015; Pavlenko, 2012; and Ayçiçegi & Harris, 2004) believe the first language is more emotional than the 2nd Language in bilinguals. Iranian studies (Bahrami et al., 2020)also approved this. However, this research shall evaluate the formation of early Mental Emotion Lexicon in adult balanced bilinguals and the impact of positive emotions on lexical access as cognitive executive functions.‎ To evaluate the hypothesis through the experiment, forty ‏Turkish-Persian bilingual students with an average age ‎of ‎‏22-30‏‎ , SD=2.25, were selected from Islamic Azad ‎University students in Tehran to participate ‎in this quasi-experimental research. Participants were asked to complete the Bilingual History Questionnaire, the General ‎Health Questionnaire, the Positive and Negative affect schedule, and a ‎DMDX word selection task to induce positive emotion/word. The emotion words list from WEAL (Word Emotion Association Lexicon) was ‎validated under translation advantage. Repeated measures in ANOVA revealed that the participants’ ‎significantly‎ spent fast reaction time determining both languages’ emotion words to images, ‎induced with intense ‎positive emotion. The results showed that positive emotion processing ‎facilitates the RT more than inhibitory (negative) emotions in bilinguals. Early formation of a bilingual emotion lexicon causes balance in emotional distance. These approve the findings of ‎previous studies. ‎The results can be further referred to as literature on bilingualism cognitive advantage studies and propose mental emotion lexicon as criteria for bilingual ‎proficiency assessments.

The most important issues in the bi/multilingual aphasics study are the types of aphasia and language recovery patterns. This paper reported the linguistic profile (language impairment, aphasia type, and language recovery pattern) of a bilingual Azerbaijani-Persian patient with a subcortical brain lesion (basal ganglia). This study is fundamentally applicable in terms of its purpose. From the perspective of how to analyze the data, it is a case study. The patient was interviewed to determine his linguistic background, and his MRI report was examined to locate his brain lesions. Azerbaijani and Persian versions of the bilingual aphasia test (BAT) were employed to evaluate his linguistic performance. Data analyses showed that the patient had better linguistic performance in his L2. Moreover, he had poor performance in the production of his L1 and good performance in the comprehension of his L1. He could easily translate from L1 to L2, but it was not easy to do so from L2 to L1. He had Broca’s aphasia in his L1 and subcortical aphasia in his L2. In addition, his language recovery pattern was different. We can conclude that the lesion in the subcortical area may not necessarily lead to similar aphasia in the first and second language of the patient. The findings also revealed that Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism and declarative and procedural model could account for the bilingual patient’s linguistic performance and language recovery pattern with subcortical damage.

In China, the prevalence of academic dishonesty relative to the United States has attracted considerable negative attention—one explanation for observed differences in cultural norms around the acceptability of individual unethical academic behaviors. The unique academic experience of bilingual Chinese students enrolled in Sino-American universities presents an opportunity to investigate whether academic experience in English influences attitudes and behaviors about academic integrity. Drawing from research on the Foreign Language Effect, the present study tested the hypothesis that knowledge, and by extension behavior, associated with academic integrity is bound to the English language. Mandarin-English bilingual university students (n = 106) completed objective and self-reporting language experience assessments and responded to two dilemmas that mirror commonly experienced academic scenarios. All experimental stimuli were presented entirely in either Mandarin or English. We identified a modulatory role of English proficiency with higher levels associated with a lower likelihood of plagiarism when dilemmas were presented in English. Additional findings suggest that separable dimensions of the English experience interact to modulate responses to academic integrity dilemmas. This study reports evidence in support of a modulatory influence of English language experience on academic integrity attitudes and behaviors. Findings suggest that higher levels of English proficiency may reflect higher access to Western norms around academic integrity. The present study contributes to our growing understanding of how differences in language experience impact cognition in specific contexts.

Factors like polysemy, diversified usage of prepositions in different contexts, and collocation of prepositions with special verbs make non-Persian speakers’ Persian learning challenging. This research focuses on the type and frequency of errors in using simple prepositions in Sa’adi Foundation’s corpus of written texts, presenting new analytical cognitive theories. Following the descriptive-analytical method, this article extracts data on a systematic random sampling basis from the corpus of texts written by non-Persian speakers in six different competency levels. One hundred six samples of texts written by the statistical population were randomly selected from the corpus of 535 texts, extracting a collection of 1,369 phrases/clauses. Then errors in using simple Persian prepositions in the sentences were identified and classified. Results showed that errors in using prepositions could be classified into three groups: “Illogical Addition,” “Illogical Omission,” and “Substitution of Wrong Preposition,” each having sub-divisions. Afterward, errors were analyzed based on Lakoff’s (1987) and Johnson’s (1987) image schema theory and Tyler and Evans’s (2003) Principled Polysemy. Analysis of errors showed that the cognitive system’s principled polysemy is formed in learners’ minds while making errors in using special prepositions in parallel paths, too. One reason for such errors is that different prepositional concepts are taught in isolation. Any endeavor in cognitive linguistics that successfully relates the prototypical meaning and peripheral meanings will help connect prepositions’ conceptual network. When teaching prepositions, teachers should consider their semantic networks.

Gliomas are brain tumors infiltrating healthy cortical and subcortical areas that may host cognitive functions like language. The patient might develop word retrieval or articulation problems if these areas are damaged during surgery. For this reason, many glioma patients are operated on awake while their language functions are tested. For this practice, simple tests are used, such as picture naming. In this presentation, the process of picture naming (noun retrieval) will be described, and the timeline and localization of the distinguished stages are shown, from activation of the concept, via the retrieval of the word to the planning and execution of articulation. This information can guide the neurosurgeon and the clinical linguist in choosing the language tests during the operation. A novel technique to localize the language areas in a brain tumor patient allows the neurosurgeon to acquire the relevant information surgically. With navigated Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS), the function of small cortical areas can be inhibited very shortly, allowing the identification of the areas involved in the language production process. Thus, nTMS can guide the neurosurgeon in approaching and removing the tumor. It will be argued that nouns and verbs should be tested since sentences are built around verbs, and sentences are what we use in daily life. Two case studies of glioma patients illustrate this approach’s relevance.

The motor-language coupling hypothesis posits that action language processing is grounded in the motor system. In several studies, we provided causal and clinical evidence that supports this hypothesis. In the first study, we demonstrated that stimulating the left motor cortex differentially affected processing sentences with action verbs (e.g., throwing) compared to abstract visual verbs (e.g., to consider). Interestingly, the involvement of the motor cortex was similar when action verbs were used literally or figuratively. In the second study, we were interested in examining whether the involvement of the motor system is limited to action verbs or would be extended to nouns with high motor content (e.g., hammer). Findings from the second experiment indicated that stimulation of primary and higher-order motor regions modulated both action verbs and manipulated nouns compared to non-action verbs and non-manipulated nouns. These findings would lead to the hypothesis that action verbs and manipulated nouns would be significantly impaired compared to non-action verbs and non-manipulated nouns in movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), wherein the motor system is substantially compromised. Indeed, converging evidence confirms this account by showing more impairments in action vs. non-actions verbs. However, fewer studies examined the effect of PD on naming manipulated vs. non-manipulated objects. In the third study, we demonstrated that the naming of manipulated objects was significantly impaired in PD compared to non-manipulated objects. Overall, these findings provide insight into the action language processing in the human brain and have translational implications.

The comparison of verbal abilities in normal and dyslexic children is an important issue in Psycholinguistics. Evidence shows dyslexic children perform poorly in complex syntactic processing tests compared to normal children. This study investigates and compares subject-verb agreement processing in relative clauses and simple sentences in normal and dyslexic Persian-speaking elementary school students. The subject-verb agreement is investigated considering categories of “person,” “number,” and “both person and number.” Subjects were sixty elementary school second and third graders (mean age of 8.6 years), including forty normal and twenty dyslexic children, assessed by a syntactic awareness test, including two subtests, i.e., grammaticality judgment and sentence correction tasks. The subject-verb agreement was evaluated in two syntactic structures; simple sentences and complex sentences with relative clauses. The relative clauses sentences were of subject-subject type. Subjects were assessed to recognize the grammatical category of subject-verb agreement based on “person,” “number,” or both “person and number.” The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods. Based on the independent T-test analysis, dyslexic children revealed a lower performance than normal students in the whole test and each subtest. On the other hand, third graders had a better performance than second graders in both groups. In both groups, children made more mistakes where the subject-verb agreement was based on “number.” This finding indicates that “number” is a syntactic factor that is more abstract and complex than “person.”