Florencia Reali

• PhD
• Associate professor at Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCU)

Psychonarratology is a discipline that combines classic frameworks in narratology and psycholinguistics. The goal of this review article is to highlight the contributions that recent evidence from causality processing studies, conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition can make to Psychonarratology, in order to promote a more comprehensive s...

La World Wide Web promete una vía hacia la democratización de la información. Sin embargo, si bien los medios online ofrecen espacios para la pluralidad y la diversidad de voces, las nuevas formas de difusión de noticias presentan riesgos: el colectivo tiende a constituirse en “cámaras de eco” donde los mensajes se refuerzan y distorsionan potencia...

Metaphors influence general attitudes towards political and social ideas (Otieno et al. 2016). In particular, war metaphors are very common in political discourse. Their framing effects, however, depend on the context in which war metaphors are used, rendering positive or negative outcomes (Flusberg et al. 2018; Thibodeau, 2018). Reali (2021) explo...

This article compares abstract concepts and metaphorical classes in order to emphasize the abstract nature of metaphorical classes. Sam Glucksberg (2003) used the expression “abstract superordinate categories” to refer to metaphorical classes. Drawing on this proposal and George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory, this articl...

Estudio longitudinal sobre las relaciones entre memoria de trabajo y comprensión narrativa en niños montevideanos entre 4 y 6 años La relación longitudinal entre comprensión narrativa y memoria de trabajo ha sido poco estudiada para la población preescolar latinoamericana. Objetivo: Informar sobre la relación longitudinal entre comprensión narrativ...

This article compares abstract concepts and metaphorical classes in order to emphasize the abstract nature of metaphorical classes. Glucksberg (2003) used the expression “abstract superordinate categories” to refer to metaphorical classes. Drawing on this proposal and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory, this article suggests tha...

TIME is a highly abstract concept and prevalent in languages worldwide. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research suggests that TIME is embodied dissimilarly in different languages. Still the literature has not received sufficient attention in examining the differences. This study aimed to identify and compare how TIME is metaphorically represen...

According to Glucksberg's class-inclusion model of metaphor comprehension, metaphors are understood by the inclusion of the topic X into a metaphorical class of the vehicle Y. But what is the cognitive mechanisms through which X is included in the metaphorical class of Y? Drawing on previous literature on the roles of semantic features, metonymy, a...

Los niños que usan sistemas aumentativos y alternativos de comunicación (saac) experimentan dificultades significativas en la producción del lenguaje complejo, en particular, para construir narraciones ficticias o personales. La aproximación socioconstructivista al desarrollo ha realizado un amplio aporte teórico que muestra el importante papel de...

In this paper, we classify metaphors into four categories: motion-based metaphors, static space-based metaphors, static object-based metaphors, and static event-based metaphors. Then, a study that investigated the use of gestures with these types of metaphors is reported. The aim was to examine how these types of metaphors are used with metaphoric...

In this paper, we classify metaphors into four categories: motion-based metaphors, static space-based metaphors, static object-based metaphors, and static event-based metaphors. Then, a study that investigated the use of gestures with these types of metaphors is reported. The aim was to examine how these types of metaphors are used with metaphoric...

Online media has enabled the representation of important feminist ideas. However, a tendency towards a negative and sexualized construction of feminism in popular culture has been documented. One way to examine opinions and attitudes towards social matters is to explore metaphors as they influence reasoning and decision-making. Previous work has sh...

This paper shows the results of a qualitative research on the evaluations of teachers on the implementation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems (SAAC) with children with cerebral palsy in the Public Special Education of Uruguay. The access to communication constitutes a fundamental right of any child. In Uruguay, intervention in l...

This paper shows the results of a qualitative research on the evaluations of teachers on the implementation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems (SAAC) with children with cerebral palsy in the Public Special Education of Uruguay. The access to communication constitutes a fundamental right of any child. In Uruguay, intervention in l...

Los tiempos que corren presentan una nueva variante del discurso del amo asociado a ideologías extremistas: el fenómeno de la posverdad. Este fenómeno se traduce en que los mensajes políticos e ideológicos obtienen su valor de la reacción emocional que despiertan en la opinión pública, independientemente de si los hechos declarados tienen alguna ev...

Cognitive stylistics provides a framework for analysis of conceptual metaphors in literature, as a way to approach fictional characters’ mind styles. Here, cognitive linguistic tools are applied to characterize the metaphorical expressions of emotion in James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man . A number of conceptual metaphors were id...

Resumen El presente trabajo constituye una revisión exhaustiva que tiene por objetivo establecer la importancia de los Sistemas Aumentativos y Alternativos de Comunicación (SAAC) como herramientas de asistencia para la producción narrativa en niños y adolescentes con parálisis cerebral (PC). En particular, se analizaron las prácticas educativas rel...

COMUNICACIÓN AUMENTATIVA Y ALTERNATIVA Y CONSTRUCCIÓN NARRATIVA EN NIÑOS CON PARÁLISIS CEREBRAL Resumen El presente trabajo constituye una revisión exhaustiva que tiene por objetivo establecer la importancia de los Sistemas Aumentativos y Alternativos de Comunicación (SAAC) como herramientas de asistencia para la producción narrativa en niños y ado...

El presente trabajo se enmarca dentro del proyecto de investigación «El rol de los sistemas aumentativos y alternativos para la comunicación (saac) en alumnos con parálisis cerebral en la educación especial pública uruguaya», perteneciente a la línea de Inclusión Social y Educativa del Instituto de Psicología, Educación y Desarrollo Humano. Este fu...

Language development depends on social aspects of cognition, such as intersubjectivity. Given the interdependence of patterns of language use and social cognitive aspects of communication, we question whether there is a measurable relation between lexico-grammatical complexity and the construction of intersubjectivity in children’s narratives. We a...

How are the domains of space and time related? One approach, A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM), proposes an undifferentiated system of magnitude representation in the brain, predicting that space and time are symmetrically related, while Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposes that we represent time using spatial metaphors, predicting asymmetrical int...

Previous work has shown that the abstract use of the spatial prepositions in and on retains spatial meaning, such as containment and support that includes the control relationship between a located object (the figure) and a reference object (the landmark/ground) (Feist & Gentner, 2003; Talmy, 1983). We extend these ideas to the case of metaphorical...

Languages with many speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, the opposite pattern appears to be observed for non-structural properties of language such as vocabulary size. These apparently opposite patterns pose a challenge for theories of language c...

Prior research shows that shared book reading promotes preschoolers’ language and literacy skills. However, little is known about the potential role of books’ features – in particular, the role of using wordless picture books compared with books with text – in children’s spontaneous language production and teachers’ instructional support. In this s...

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine-grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of dif...

El presente estudio examina la relación entre la ansiedad matemática y el desempeño matemático, en un grupo de estudiantes colombianos. Un total de 296 estudiantes entre 8 y 16 años de edad participaron en la investigación. Se realizaron análisis por género y grado escolar, controlando por otros tipos de ansiedad (i.e., general y relacionada con ex...

Interpreting temporal statements involves adopting alternative frames of reference. Previous work has shown that people draw on time-moving or ego-moving perspectives to interpret statements such as Next Wednesday´s meeting has been moved forward two days . The expression move forward in English can be translated into Spanish as mover hacia adelant...

Descriptions of emotional disorders vary according to cultural and historical context. Framing mental illness as a disease – as opposed to being a consequence of psychosocial factors – has been proposed as a strategy to fight stigma in recent years. Here we combine two studies, a corpus analysis and an experimental survey, to explore this issue in...

Over the last two decades, accumulating work in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics has provided evidence that language shapes thought. Conceptual metaphor theory proposes that the conceptual structure of emotions emerges through metaphorization from concrete concepts such as spatial orientation and physical containment. Primary metaphors f...

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the overwh...

Conceptual metaphor theory proposes that the conceptual structure of emotions emerges through metaphorization from concrete concepts such spatial orientation and physical containment. Primary metaphors for emotions have been described in a wide range of languages. Here we show the results of a corpus analysis revealing that certain metaphors such a...

It has been observed that languages with huge numbers of speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities can sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, an apparent opposite pattern appears to be observed in relation to non-structural properties of language such as number of content words. These appa...

Mediante la combinación de métodos de análisis comportamental y lingüísticos se estudió la relación entre el uso del lenguaje y los patrones atributivos en jóvenes y niños colombianos en distintas etapas de su desarrollo y en diferentes contextos regionales. Se midió la producción de juicios atributivos con el fin de analizar el rol relativo de fac...

Using behavioral and linguistic analysis methods, the relation between language usage and attributive patterns in Colombian youngsters and children was studied, taking into account that this population belongs to different regional contexts and developmental stages. Production of attributive judgments was measured in order to analyze the relative r...

Although there may be no true language universals, it is nonetheless possible to discern several family resemblance patterns across the languages of the world. Recent work on the cultural evolution of language indicates the source of these patterns is unlikely to be an innate universal grammar evolved through biological adaptations for arbitrary li...

This chapter hypothesizes that integrating multiple probabilistic cues (phonological, prosodic, and distributional) by perceptually attuned general-purpose learning mechanisms, may hold promise for explaining how children solve the bootstrapping problem. Multiple cues can provide reliable evidence about linguistic structure that is unavailable from...

Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However, the...

A key challenge for theories of language evolution is to explain why language is the way it is and how it came to be that way. It is clear that how we learn and use language is governed by genetic constraints. However, the nature of these innate constraints has been the subject of much debate. Although many accounts of language evolution have empha...

The regularization of linguistic structures by learners has played a key role in arguments for strong innate constraints on language acquisition, and has important implications for language evolution. However, relating the inductive biases of learners to regularization behavior in laboratory tasks can be challenging without a formal model. In this...

Natural languages share common features known as linguistic universals but the nature and origin of these features remain controversial. Generative approaches propose that linguistic universals are defined by a set of innately specified linguistic constraints in universal grammar (UG). The UG hypothesis is primarily supported by Poverty of Stimulus...

It is widely assumed that language in some form or other originated by piggybacking on pre-existing learning mechanism not dedicated to language. Using evolutionary connectionist simulations, we explore the implications of such assumptions by determining the effect of constraints derived from an earlier evolved mechanism for sequential learning on...

Language acquisition and processing are governed by genetic constraints. A crucial unresolved question is how far these genetic constraints have coevolved with language, perhaps resulting in a highly specialized and species-specific language "module," and how much language acquisition and processing redeploy preexisting cognitive machinery. In the...

Language comprehension in humans is significantly constrai ned by memory, yet rapid, highly incremental, and capable of utilizing a wide r ange of contextual information to resolve ambiguity and form expectations about future input. In contrast, most of the leading psycholinguistic models and fi elded algorithms for natural language parsing are non...

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable fra...

We present experimental support for the view that fine-grained statistical information may play a crucial role in the processing of centre-embedded linguistic structure. Using both offline and online methods, we show that the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses is influenced by the frequency of co-occurrence of the word combinations (c...

Visual search based on a conjunction of two features typically elicits reaction times that increase linearly as a function of the number of distractors, whereas search based on a single feature is essentially unaffected by set size. These and related findings have often been interpreted as evidence of a serial search stage that follows a parallel s...

Human languages are characterized by a number of universal patterns of structure and use. Theories differ on whether such linguistic universals are best understood as arbitrary features of an innate language acquisition device or functional features deriving from cognitive and communicative constraints. From the viewpoint of language evolution, it...

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses...

The development of neural network models has greatly enhanced the comprehension of cognitive phenomena. Here, we show that models using multiplicative processing of inputs are both powerful and simple to train and understand. We believe they are valuable tools for cognitive explorations. Our model can be viewed as a subclass of networks built on si...

In the present study we provide empirical evidence that human learners succeed in an artificial-grammar learning task that involves recognizing grammatical sequences whose bigram frequencies from the training corpus are zero. This result begs explanation: Whatever strategy is being used to perform the task, it cannot rely on the simple co-occurrenc...

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives. We develop a series of child-directed corpus analyses...

Recent work in developmental psycholinguistics suggests that children may bootstrap grammatical categories and basic syntactic structure by exploiting distributional, phonological, and prosodic cues. Previous connectionist work has indicated that multiple-cue integration is computationally feasible for small artificial languages. In this paper, we...