Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence-Space Conceptual Metaphor.

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.

Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs.

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.