Seana Coulson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of California, San Diego

The temporal signatures that characterize speech—especially its prosodic qualities—are observable in the movements of the hands and bodies of its speakers. A neurobiological account of these prosodic rhythms is thus likely to benefit from insights on the neural coding principles underlying co-speech gestures. Here we consider a role for the informa...

Background Explanations for why social media users propagate misinformation include failure of classical reasoning (over-reliance on intuitive heuristics), motivated reasoning (conforming to group opinion), and personality traits (e.g., narcissism). However, there is a lack of consensus on which explanation is most predictive of misinformation spre...

The auditory steady state response (ASSR) arises when periodic sounds evoke stable responses in auditory networks that reflect the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli, such as the amplitude of the sound envelope. Larger for some stimulus rates than others, the ASSR in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) is notably maximal for sounds modulated...

Humans differ in how they experience their own thoughts. Some say they hear sentences in their “mind's ear”, others report seeing images in their “mind’s eye”, and many struggle to describe their inner worlds. Here, we tested whether individual differences in thought formats predict accuracy and properties of verbal recall after listening to short...

The temporal signatures that characterize speech—especially its prosodic qualities—are observable in the movements of the hands and bodies of its speakers. A neurobiological account of these prosodic rhythms is thus likely to benefit from insights on the neural coding principles underlying co-speech gestures. Here we consider a role for the informa...

Theoretical accounts of the N400 are divided as to whether the amplitude of the N400 response to a stimulus reflects the extent to which the stimulus was predicted, the extent to which the stimulus is semantically similar to its preceding context, or both. We use state-of-the-art machine learning tools to investigate which of these three accounts i...

The context in which a sentence appears can drastically alter our expectations about upcoming words - for example, following a short story involving an anthropomorphic peanut, experimental participants are more likely to expect the sentence 'the peanut was in love' than 'the peanut was salted', as indexed by N400 amplitude (Nieuwland & van Berkum,...

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisat...

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields hav...

The Manual section of the Handbook of Pragmatics, produced under the auspices of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), is a collection of articles describing traditions, methods, and notational systems relevant to the field of linguistic pragmatics; the main body of the Handbook contains all topical articles. The first edition of the Man...

An axiom of Per Aage Brandt’s approach to conceptual blending, known colloquially as the “Aarhus model”, is that semiosis only makes sense when grounded in communicative interaction. Here we adopt that approach in relation to the reality of current, daily communication which is increasingly mediated by digital audio-visual technology platforms. We...

More predictable words are easier to process—they are read faster and elicit smaller neural signals associated with processing difficulty, most notably, the N400 component of the event-related brain potential. Thus, it has been argued that prediction of upcoming words is a key component of language comprehension, and that studying the amplitude of...

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy, col...

More predictable words are easier to process - they are read faster and elicit smaller neural signals associated with processing difficulty, most notably, the N400 component of the event-related brain potential. Thus, it has been argued that prediction of upcoming words is a key component of language comprehension, and that studying the amplitude o...

Despite being designed for performance rather than cognitive plausibility, transformer language models have been found to be better at predicting metrics used to assess human language comprehension than language models with other architectures, such as recurrent neural networks. Based on how well they predict the N400, a neural signal associated wi...

Despite being designed for performance rather than cognitive plausibility, transformer language models have been found to be better at predicting metrics used to assess human language comprehension than language models with other architectures, such as recurrent neural networks. Based on how well they predict the N400, a neural signal associated wi...

Here we examine the role of visuospatial working memory (WM) during the comprehension of multimodal discourse with co-speech iconic gestures. EEG was recorded as healthy adults encoded either a sequence of one (low load) or four (high load) dot locations on a grid and rehearsed them until a free recall response was collected later in the trial. Dur...

Multimodal discourse requires an assembly of cognitive processes that are uniquely recruited for language comprehension in social contexts. In this study, we investigated the role of verbal working memory for the online integration of speech and iconic gestures. Participants memorized and rehearsed a series of auditorily presented digits in low (on...

Emotion concepts are important. They help us to understand, experience and predict human behaviour. Emotion concepts also link the realm of the abstract with the realm of bodily experience and actions. Accordingly, the key question is how such concepts are created, represented and used. Embodied cognition theories hold that concepts are grounded in...

Here we review literature on the neural basis of synesthesia and consider whether similar mechanisms might be relevant for the neural underpinnings of metaphor in language.

In grapheme-color synesthesia, seeing a particular letter or number evokes the experience of a highly specific color. Here we investigate the brain’s real-time processing of words in this population, by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 15 grapheme-color synesthetes and 15 controls as they judged the validity of word pairs (“yell...

Sensorimotor models suggest that understanding the emotional content of a face recruits a simulation process in which a viewer partially reproduces the facial expression in their own sensorimotor system. An important prediction of these models is that disrupting simulation should make emotion recognition more difficult. Here we used electroencephal...

There is a lively and theoretically important debate about whether, how, and when embodiment contributes to language comprehension. This study addressed these questions by testing how interference with facial action impacts the brain's real-time response to emotional language. Participants read sentences about positive and negative events (e.g., “S...

To understand a speaker's gestures, people may draw on kinesthetic working memory (KWM)-a system for temporarily remembering body movements. The present study explored whether sensitivity to gesture meaning was related to differences in KWM capacity. KWM was evaluated through sequences of novel movements that participants viewed and reproduced with...

Embodied metaphor theory suggests abstract concepts are metaphorically linked to more experientially basic ones and recruit sensorimotor cortex for their comprehension. To test whether words associated with spatial attributes reactivate traces in sensorimotor cortex, we recorded EEG from the scalp of healthy adults as they read words while performi...

Three experiments tested the role of verbal versus visuo-spatial working memory in the comprehension of co-speech iconic gestures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed congruent discourse primes in which the speaker's gestures matched the information conveyed by his speech, and incongruent ones in which the semantic content of the speaker's gesture...

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The moveme...

Time-space synesthesia is a variant of sequence-space synesthesia and involves the involuntary association of months of the year with 2D and 3D spatial forms, such as arcs, circles, and ellipses. Previous studies have revealed conflicting results regarding the association between time-space synesthesia and enhanced spatial processing ability. Here,...

Conceptual mapping, or making connections between conceptual structure in different domains, is a key mechanism of creative language use whose neural underpinnings are not well understood. The present study involved the combination of event-related potentials (ERPs) with the divided visual field presentation technique to explore the relative contri...

Creativity in LanguageJoke ComprehensionMetaphorConclusion References

In one common variant of time-space synaesthesia, individuals report the consistent experience of months bound to a spatial arrangement, commonly described as a circle extending outside of the body. Whereas the layout of these calendars has previously been thought to be relatively random and to differ greatly between synaesthetes, Study 1 provides...

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent a...

Linguists have suggested that one mechanism for the creative extension of meaning in language involves mapping, or constructing correspondences between conceptual domains. For example, the sentence, "The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat," sets up a novel mapping between the concepts cardboard box and boat, while "His main method of transp...

Grapheme–color synesthesia is a heritable trait where graphemes (“2”) elicit the concurrent perception of specific colors (red). Researchers have questioned whether synesthetic experiences are meaningful or simply arbitrary associations and whether these associations are perceptual or conceptual. To address these fundamental questions, ERPs were re...

This chapter examines how neuroscience can inform the study and practice of law. It begins with a brief overview of the EEG experiments that were used to study the behavioural and neural correlates of persuasion. It then describes the hypotheses, as well as the data and methods that used to test them. Next, experimental results on subjects' decisio...

The perceptual modalities associated with property words, such as flicker or click, have previously been demonstrated to affect subsequent property verification judgments (Pecher et al., 2003). Known as the conceptual modality switch effect, this finding supports the claim that brain systems for perception and action help subserve the representatio...

One of the most broadly investigated topics in the literature on conceptual mappings is the importance of spatial construals for thinking and talking about time. In two forthcoming articles [1] [7] we explore how people understand timelines - both as graphical objects, in discourse about timelines taken from newspapers and the web, and in poetic ex...

One of the most broadly investigated topics in the literature on conceptual metaphor is the importance of spatial construals for thinking and talking about time. Here we address the relationship between conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and conceptual integration theory (CIT) by exploring how people understand timelines – both as graphical objects,...

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which letters and numbers (graphemes) consistently evoke particular colors (e.g. A may be experienced as red). The cross-activation theory proposes that synesthesia arises as a result of cross-activation between posterior temporal grapheme areas (PTGA) and color processing area V4, while th...

Some people report that they consistently and involuntarily associate time events, such as months of the year, with specific spatial locations; a condition referred to as time-space synesthesia. The present study investigated the manner in which such synesthetic time-space associations affect visuo-spatial attention via an endogenous cuing paradigm...

Two experiments investigated the processing and appreciation of double grounding, a form of intentional ambiguity often used in the construction of headlines. For example, in “Russia takes the froth off Carlsberg results,” the key element, “takes the froth off,” is significant both metaphorically, where it refers to the detrimental impact of Russia...

Electroencephalogram was recorded as healthy adults viewed short videos of spontaneous discourse in which a speaker used depictive gestures to complement information expressed through speech. Event-related potentials were computed time-locked to content words in the speech stream and to subsequent related and unrelated picture probes. Gestures modu...

Time-space synesthetes report that they experience the months of the year as having a spatial layout. In Study 1, we characterize the phenomenology of calendar sequences produced by synesthetes and non-synesthetes, and show a conservative estimate of time-space synesthesia at 2.2% of the population. We demonstrate that synesthetes most commonly exp...

Historically, language researchers have assumed that lexical, or word-level processing is fast and automatic, while slower, more controlled post-lexical processes are sensitive to contextual information from higher levels of linguistic analysis. Here we demonstrate the impact of sentence context on the processing of words not available for consciou...

An important issue in irony comprehension concerns when and how listeners integrate extra-linguistic and linguistic information to compute the speaker's intended meaning. To assess whether knowledge about the speaker's communicative style impacts the brain response to irony, ERPs were recorded as participants read short passages that ended either w...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the real-time processing of non-conventional indirect requests and literal statement control stimuli in 20 healthy adults. Participants read short story scenarios ending in a 7-word target utterance that could be interpreted either liter-ally, as a statement, or non-literally, as an indirec...

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the int...

While much is known about citizens' decisions to trust others, much less is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying these decisions. Thus, we analyze both the behavior and brain activity associated with these decisions by replicating well known experiments on trust with electroencephalograph (EEG) and timed-response technology. Although our...

An important issue in irony comprehension concerns when and how listeners integrate extra-linguistic and linguistic information to compute the speaker's intended meaning. To assess whether knowledge about the speaker's communicative style impacts the brain response to irony, ERPs were recorded as participants read short passages that ended either w...

Traditional models of language comprehension as a decoding process are argued to involve an over-attribution of the import of linguistic information, and an overly narrow view of the role of background and contextual knowledge. In contrast, the space structuring model accords background and contextual knowledge a central role in the construction of...

To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played three variants of the coin toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses a...

A comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has been written in response to the growing interest among scholars and students from a variety of disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, music and psychology. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture and ar...

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which particular graphemes, such as the numeral 9, automatically induce the simultaneous perception of a particular color, such as the color red. To test whether the concurrent color sensations in grapheme-color synaesthesia are treated as meaningful stimuli, we recorded event-related brai...

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego-moving or object-moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley-moving clips showed...

How are metaphors understood in local context? The authors examine the rise of the expression "connect the dots" as it appears in the speech of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke in a radio interview. Although conceptual metaphor theory provides important insights into the congruence of the connect-the-dots-metaphor with conventional metaphori...

A hallmark of schizophrenia is impaired proverb interpretation, which could be due to: (1) aberrant activation of disorganized semantic associations, or (2) working memory (WM) deficits. We assessed 18 schizophrenia patients and 18 normal control participants on proverb interpretation, and evaluated these two hypotheses by examining within patients...

EEG was recorded as adults watched short segments of spontaneous discourse in which the speaker's gestures and utterances contained complementary information. Videos were followed by one of four types of picture probes: cross-modal related probes were congruent with both speech and gestures; speech-only related probes were congruent with informatio...

Methods in Cognitive Linguistics is an introduction to empirical methodology for language researchers. Intended as a handbook to exploring the empirical dimension of the theoretical questions raised by Cognitive Linguistics, the volume presents guidelines for employing methods from a variety of intersecting disciplines, laying out different ways of...

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere (RH) has a privileged role in the processing of figurative language, including metaphors, idioms, and verbal humor. Previous experiments using hemifield visual presentation combined with human electrophysiology support the idea that the RH plays a special role in joke comprehension. The current study...

To assess priming by iconic gestures, we recorded EEG (at 29 scalp sites) in two experiments while adults watched short, soundless videos of spontaneously produced, cospeech iconic gestures followed by related or unrelated probe words. In Experiment 1, participants classified the relatedness between gestures and words. In Experiment 2, they attende...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as healthy participants listened to puns such as "During branding, cowboys have sore calves." To assess hemispheric differences in pun comprehension, visually presented probes that were either highly related (COW), moderately related (LEG), or unrelated, were presented in either the left or right visual...

Metaphoric language involves reference to one domain with vocabulary more commonly associated with another domain. Near-sighted in near-sighted bureaucrat is metaphoric, since a term from the source domain of vision is applied to the target domain of understanding. Linguists have discovered systematic patterns of metaphoric expressions and have arg...

Attested instances of persuasive discourse were examined from the perspective of conceptual blending theory to reveal that serious argumentative points are often made via the construction of unrealistic blended cognitive models. The unrealistic character of these models is often related to compression , a process by which complex relationships are...

This article reviews cognitive neuroscience research on visual and language process-ing to suggest an analogy between the neural interpolation mechanisms in perceptual processing and the constructive processes that underlie meaning construction in lan-guage. Traditional models of language comprehension as a decoding process are ar-gued to involve a...

We describe the space structuring model, a model of language comprehen-sion inspired by ideas in cognitive linguistics, focusing on its capacity to ex-plain the sorts of inferences needed to understand one-line jokes. One pro-cess posited in the model is frame-shifting, the semantic and pragmatic reanalysis in which elements of the existing message...

If computers are ever going to communicate naturally and effectively with humans, they must be able to use humor. Moreover, humor provides insight into how humans process real, complex, creative language. By modeling humor generation and understanding on computers, we can gain a better picture of how the human brain handles not just humor but langu...

Autonomous online social systems can emerge from the interaction between the stable social practices of soliciting and eavesdropping when they are performed online. These practices are distributed manifestations of the stable mental operation of conceptual blending. The technology mediating the communication in the practices must be polymorphic, no...

To assess semantic processing of iconic gestures, EEG (29 scalp sites) was recorded as adults watched cartoon segments paired with soundless videos of congruous and incongruous gestures followed by probe words. Event-related potentials time-locked to the onset of gestures and probe words were measured in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participan...

In this article, we examine the relationship between literal and figurative meanings in view of mental spaces and conceptual blending theory as developed by Fauconnier and Turner [Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, New York]. Beginning with a brief introduct...

Conceptual integration, or blending, is a theoretical framework for describing how people combine information from different domains to yield new concepts. Previous work suggests that blending processes are important for humor production and comprehension, as humorous examples often involve the construction of hybrid cognitive models in so-called b...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that the right hemisphere engages in relatively coarse semantic coding that aids high-level language tasks such as joke comprehension. Scalp-recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were collected as healthy adults read probe words (CRAZY) preceded either by jokes or nonfunny controls (“Everyone had so much f...

Joke comprehension deficits in patients with right hemisphere (RH) damage raise the question of the role of the intact RH in understanding jokes. One suggestion is that semantic, or meaning, activations are different in the RH and LH, and RH meanings are particularly important for joke comprehension. To assess whether hypothesized differences in se...

Researchers using lateralized stimuli have suggested that the left hemisphere is sensitive to sentence-level context, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) primarily processes word-level meaning. The authors investigated this message-blind RH model by measuring associative priming with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). For word pairs in isolation,...

To assess age-related changes in simple syntactic processing with normal aging, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by grammatical number violations as individuals read sentences for comprehension were analyzed. Violations were found to elicit a P600 of equal amplitude and latency regardless of an individual's age. Instead, advancing age...

To address the impact of differences in language lateralization on joke comprehension, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as 16 left- and 16 right-handed adults read one-line jokes and non-funny control stimuli ("A replacement player hit a home run with my girl/ball,"). In right-handers, jokes elicited a late positivity 500-900 ms...