Volume 21 (2017): Issue 1 (January 2017)

Two experiments investigated the effects of linguistic abstractness on the experience of collective moral emotions. In Experiment 1 participants were presented with two scenarios about ingroup misbehavior, phrased using descriptive action verbs, interpretative action verbs, adjectives or nouns. The results show that participants experienced slightly more negative moral emotions with higher levels of linguistic abstractness. In Experiment 2 we also tested for the influence of national identification on the relationship between linguistic abstractness and emotional reactions. Additionally, we expanded the number of scenarios. Experiment 2 replicated the earlier pattern, but found larger differences between conditions. The strength of national identification did not moderate the observed effects. The results of this research are discussed within the context of the linguistic category model and psychology of collective moral emotions.

Information seeking by asking questions is fundamental to solving some problems. How quickly it proceeds can be important, especially if stakes are high. This experiment compared the processing times of three question types generated by early adolescents, middle adolescents, and young adults who sought to identify unknown target exemplars in a series of test arrays. Category questions, which eliminate alternatives based on their membership in contrasting mutually exclusive sets, were of two types: conceptual and perceptual. Conceptual category questions took longer to generate than perceptual category questions for all age groups. Syncretic questions, which refer to more than one category, took longer to generate than perceptual category questions for early adolescents, although they did not take longer to generate than perceptual category questions for the two older groups. Age-related changes in cognitive processing, syncretic thinking, and experience with hypothesis testing provide a framework for interpreting these results.

This paper presents the results of a frequency analysis of causal conjunctions and explainers in the speech of persons categorised as low-anxious, high-anxious, and repressors, selected according to the criteria of Weinberger et al. (1979). Ninety female students, assigned to three groups: high-anxious persons (n = 30), low-anxious persons (n = 30), and anxiety repressors (n = 30), gave a speech lasting several minutes concerning personality features that they liked or disliked in themselves. The results strongly confirmed the hypothesis that there are differences in the frequency of use of causal conjunctions and explainers between repressors, high-anxious, and low-anxious individuals. Their number is highest in the utterances of repressors and lowest in the utterances of low-anxious individuals. Our study demonstrates that the experiencing of anxiety does not in itself lead to an increase in the frequency of use of causal expressions. The key factor would appear to be a high level of defensiveness and absence of insight into one’s emotional states, characteristic of repressors. This may lead to a need to rationalise and to seek possible causes for the state of anxiety, which is externalised linguistically through the use of a high number of causal expressions.

In two studies, we tested the relationship between children’s label-learning experience and label-learning ability within diverse superordinate categories with complex perceptual organization (animals, clothing, foods). Using both quasi-experimental and experimental designs, we examined 18- and 24-month-old children’s ability to generalize labels for novel members of superordinate categories as a product of their previous experience in learning labels for members of those categories. As predicted, children properly generalized more labels for members of the categories within which they had more label-learning experience than for members of the categories within which they had less label-learning experience. Results are consistent with the idea that children develop category-specific label-learning biases through their experience in learning labels for category members; they carry implications for multiple accounts of vocabulary acquisition and identify directions for future research.

We propose a new method to measure distances between different I-positions in internal dialogue. Subjects facing and then making a major life decision via internal dialogue can indicate the places of different voices in the dialogical self’s structure. The subjects’ task is to assign a place to themselves (narrator I) and their imaginary interlocutors at a round table. The Dialogical Self's Round Table (DSRT) task, a modified form of the Semantic Distance Task (SDT; Bartczak & Bokus, 2013, 2017), was designed so that the distances between the different I-positions could be coded numerically. Presenting the method of the DSRT, we will answer the question of which voices are activated the most often in internal dialogues, and which voices can be heard the most often from different locations at the round table. We will also analyze where the subjects place the voices they consider to be the most important.

The present study employed a serial forced choice inductive inference paradigm to test whether rural and urban 5-year-olds varying in SES rely on the representation of living things in extending new knowledge. Sixty-five children learned that humans possess a novel internal property and, in a series of test trials, had to decide whether to attribute the property to an inanimate living thing or to an artifact. Additionally, the size of children’s receptive vocabulary was assessed. This study provides the first evidence that those 5-year-olds who have access to rich nature and who have acquired a high level of receptive vocabulary do rely on living kinds in induction in a forced choice task. The study further underscores the necessity to include children with diverse backgrounds in research on the development of biological knowledge. It also provides new evidence that general cognitive ability links to advances in children’s biological understanding.

This article describes a cross-cultural study comparing bicultural identity of first generation Poles and high school students in the Rhône Alpes region (France), as well as French language university students in Poland. Studies show that two components, language and identity, are related. This article intends to answer questions regarding the relationship between the migrant’s bicultural identity and language proficiency. Bilingualism is operationalized as (i) listening comprehension and (ii) bidirectional translation. The results do not confirm that there is a relation between bilingual skills and identification with shared French and Polish values. Cultural identity appears to be inversely related to country of residence: Polish identity is strongest amongst immigrant youth in France and French identity is strongest amongst Polish students of French language and culture. These identities run in opposite direction to language competencies. The results suggest internalization of one of the cultures' negative stereotypes towards the other or towards itself.

In this paper we make one major point: that Roma children in Europe need to be tested in their mother tongue before school placement. Roma children are in a particularly perilous position with respect to their education. We describe the problematic linguistic situation of Roma children, who are bilingual and often bidialectal, but are frequently evaluated in the language of the state for educational placement, a process that has been shown to significantly compromise their chance of success. We then review the considerable empirical evidence that bilingual children must be evaluated in both languages to give a fair assessment of their knowledge and skills. Furthermore, strength in the mother tongue has demonstrable transfer to skills in the second language. We provide a brief summary of a new assessment for Romani that has been used successfully to evaluate children aged 3 to 6 years, and present the results of a new study using it in Slovakia on 29 children aged 3 to 6 years.

We investigated cross-cultural differences in ninth-grade students’ reported use of self-regulated strategies for writing. We assessed 12 self-regulated strategies for writing tapping environmental, behavioural, and personal self-regulated processes. Seven hundred and thirty-two Portuguese and Brazilian students in transition to high school (M_age = 14.3; 372 male and 306 female) from mainstream urban schools reported on their use of the strategies. Statistical analyses included a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with 12 dependent variables (self-regulated strategies for writing) and 2 between-subjects variables (country and gender). There were significant main effects for country with medium effect sizes and statistically significant small effect sizes for gender main effects. All-male and all-female comparisons indicated significant differences and medium effect sizes within gender groups. The majority of the differences tapped personal self-regulated strategies. Taken together, these findings suggest that initiating and controlling writing may be a contextualised bounded process.

The paper presents the case study of lexical selection in Alzheimer-type dementia. Lexical substitutions in poem recitation and conversations of a Russian speaker, who suffered Alzheimer-type dementia, were analyzed on the background of the lexical retrieval and slip-of-the-tongue phenomena. The classification of the substitutions is worked out on the basis of the links between a target word and its substitutions. The current context plays an essential role as natural priming for a substitution in a poem recitation. Some words have predisposition to be lost; the units belong to the figurative language or to the category of infrequent lexemes. In conversation, the patient masked failures by referring to the circumstances and appealing to the sense of humor. Positive emotions facilitate recollecting of words, involved in the description of real-life events, due to the relatively spared nondeclarative memory. The changes in the substitutions and paraphasias categories between AD stages are statistically significant.

Literate subjects from Western cultures form spatial-numerical associations (SNA) in left-to-right direction, which follows their reading habits. In preliterate children, sources of SNA directionality are more disputable. One possibility is that SNA follows children's early knowledge about text orientation. It could also reflect ipsilateral/contralateral tendencies in manual task execution. Furthermore, SNA's characteristics could differ depending on the evaluation method used. In this study, we test SNA in preliterate preschoolers using object counting, finger counting, and numerosity arrangement tasks. We examined the relations of SNA to children's directional reading knowledge and their manual response tendencies. Left-to-right SNA was pronounced for object counting, disappeared for the numerosity task, and was reversed for finger counting. In all tasks, left-to-right SNA dominated in children who responded contralaterally with their hand. Reading knowledge was partially related to numerosity-based SNA, but not to other SNAs. Based on these findings, we discuss developmental characteristics of different forms of number-space associations.

Can the perception of a word be influenced by its grammatical gender? Can it happen that speakers of one language perceive an object to have masculine features, while speakers of another language perceive the same object to have feminine features? Previous studies suggest that this is the case, and also that there is some supra-language gender categorisation of objects as natural/feminine and artefact/masculine. This study was an attempt to replicate these findings on another population of subjects. This is the first Polish study of this kind, comparing the perceptions of objects by Polish- and French-speaking individuals. The results of this study show that grammatical gender may cue people to assess objects as masculine or feminine. However, the findings of some previous studies, that feminine features are more often ascribed to natural objects than artifacts, were not replicated.

This study examined the development of social-pragmatic comprehension in 170 Finnish four- to eight-year-old children. The children were asked to respond to socially and contextually demanding questions targeting their social-pragmatic language processing, and to explain their correct answers in order to elicit their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. The results showed that the number of correct answers increased especially between the ages of four and seven years. We found that questions demanding contextual processing without mind-reading were the easiest to understand, followed by questions demanding processing of feelings of others and false beliefs. The questions demanding understanding of relevant language use and processing of contextual factors including mental states and intentions were the most challenging for the children. Between four and five years of age there was a remarkable developmental phase in children’s ability to give proper explanations.

Non-literal language most often permeates interesting and informative narratives. These are the non-perceptible, inferential aspects of a story, such as the explanation of events, the attribution of internal, particularly mental, states to the characters of the story, or the evaluation of events by the participants and/or the narrator. The main aim of this paper is to examine whether non-literal uses can be promoted in 7-year-old French-speaking children’s narratives through the use of a short conversational intervention (SCI) which focuses the children’s attention on the causes of events. The results show that, after the SCI, the expression of non-literal aspects, even higher-order ones, may make their appearance or significantly increase in children’s stories. The reasons for the effectiveness of the SCI in the promotion of non-literal uses of language and narrative skills in general, as well as the importance of using the SCI as an evaluative instrument, are discussed.

The Macbeth effect is a metaphorical association between physical and moral cleanliness - transgression of one’s morality leads to increased desire to clean oneself (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Earlier studies examined psychological associations between bodily and moral purity according to controlled processes, such as rating product desirability. The influence of the Macbeth effect on more automatic processes (stimuli processing speed) was explored in three studies. We examined whether thinking about one’s moral transgression (Studies 1 and 3) or others’ immoral behavior (Study 2) contributed to slower reaction times (RTs) to stimuli related to physical purification. It seems that automatic processes may also be affected by the metaphor “morality is purity”: It is manifested in slower RTs to stimuli associated with bodily cleansing when recalling one’s own past transgressions (Study 3) and in slower responses to words connected with purification of the external world while recalling immoral behaviors of others (Study 2).

What is a metaphoric picture of an evil person made of? In a study devoted to the development of the ability to use metaphorical descriptions of humans, the semantic fields of four target metaphors - Human-Swamp, Human-Snake, Human-Knife, and Human-Nettle - were established and compared. Subjects (365 young adults) were asked to decipher the metaphors’ meanings. The results were obtained mainly by qualitative analysis, with frequency analysis of clusters containing synonymous meanings. The results indicate that when creating imaginary characteristics of evil people, young adults seem to be more concerned about the possibility of suffering verbal harassment (most commonly: vulgarity, mockery, gossip, jeering) than the threat of actual physical assault. The results may prove useful for developmental comparisons.

The level of metaphor comprehension and interpretation was investigated in a sample of children with cleft palate (CP), aged 6;0-8;11, and healthy controls matched with age, sex, socioeconomic status, and IQ level. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R) was used to evaluate the children’s cognitive functioning, and the metaphor tests from a modified version of the Right Hemisphere Language Battery - Polish version (RHLB-PL) were used to assess comprehension of figurative language. The CP and control groups differed significantly in Verbal IQ values and in performance in the Vocabulary test, Comprehension test, Picture Metaphor Explanation test, and Written Metaphor Explanation test. In both metaphor explanation tests, children with CP gave fewer responses than controls. The results suggest no differences between children with CP and controls in understanding figurative language, although they point to weaker performance in communicating responses and producing statements in the CP children group.

The study assessed the quantity and quality of errors made by schizophrenia patients in understanding and interpretation of the same metaphors, to evaluate metaphor understanding and explanation depending on the type of presentation material, and to analyze the correlation of illness symptoms with metaphor comprehension and explanation. Two groups of participants were examined: a schizophrenia sample (40 participants) and a control group (39 participants). Metaphor processing was assessed by the subtests of the Polish version of the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB-PL). The patients were also evaluated with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Schizophrenia patients scored significantly lower in explanation of metaphors, making more incorrect literal and abstract mistakes or providing no answer more frequently. No differences were observed in understanding metaphors; no correlation between symptoms and metaphor processing was obtained. In both groups, picture metaphors were easier to comprehend and written metaphors were easier to comprehend than to explain.

Much evidence from theory and research points towards difficulties in processing metaphors by elderly people. These difficulties are usually associated with working memory and inhibitory control deficits observed in this age group, as these very functions play a crucial part in efficient metaphor processing. However, results of research on understanding metaphorical content by elderly people are inconclusive. The following article reviews studies showing that metaphor processing relies on a set of complex variables, which might explain the inconclusiveness of previous results. Though we acknowledge the role of interindividual factors (differences in cognitive functioning among the elderly), we focus on the properties of the metaphor stimuli themselves, especially those of conventionalization and valence, as they might influence the processing of verbal metaphors by people in older age groups.

Following up on the previous special issue of Psychology of Language and Communication, devoted to irony, the current one concerns metaphors - another major form of non-literal language. The authors of the presented papers examine metaphor use and understanding in a wide variety of contexts, both in adult and child, as well as normal and abnormal populations. The result is a comprehensive survey of the current state of research, which opens further avenues of potentially fruitful inquiry.