Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications

This text is a conceptual introduction to mixed effects modeling with linguistic applications, using the R programming environment. The reader is introduced to linear modeling and assumptions, as well as to mixed effects/multilevel modeling, including a discussion of random intercepts, random slopes and likelihood ratio tests. The example used throughout the text focuses on the phonetic analysis of voice pitch data.Comment: 42 pages, 17 figure

Multimodality matters in numerical communication

Modern society depends on numerical information, which must be communicated accurately and effectively. Numerical communication is accomplished in different modalities—speech, writing, sign, gesture, graphs, and in naturally occurring settings it almost always involves more than one modality at once. Yet the modalities of numerical communication are often studied in isolation. Here we argue that, to understand and improve numerical communication, we must take seriously this multimodality. We first discuss each modality on its own terms, identifying their commonalities and differences. We then argue that numerical communication is shaped critically by interactions among modalities. We boil down these interactions to four types: one modality can amplify the message of another; it can direct attention to content from another modality (e.g., using a gesture to guide attention to a relevant aspect of a graph); it can explain another modality (e.g., verbally explaining the meaning of an axis in a graph); and it can reinterpret a modality (e.g., framing an upwards-oriented trend as a bad outcome). We conclude by discussing how a focus on multimodality raises entirely new research questions about numerical communication

Can co-speech gestures alone carry the mental time line?

Time and space have been shown to be interlinked in people’s minds. To what extent can co-speech gestures influence thinking about time, over and above spoken language? In this study, we use the ambiguous question “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, what day is it on now?” to show that people either respond “Monday” or “Friday,” depending on gesture. We manipulated both language (using either the adverb “forward”, or the adverb “backward”) and gesture (forward and backward movement), thus creating matches and mismatches between speech and gesture. Results show that the speech manipulation exerts a stronger influence on people’s temporal perspectives than gesture. Moreover, the effect of gesture disappears completely for certain hand shapes and if non-movement language is used (“changed by two days” as opposed to “moved by two days”). We additionally find that the strength of the gesture effect is moderated by likeability: when people like the gesturer, they are more prone to assuming their perspective, which completely changes the meaning of forward and backward gestural movements. Altogether, our results suggest that gesture does play a role in thinking about time, but this role is auxiliary when compared to speech, and the degree to which gesture matters depends on one’s social relation to the gesturer

Semantic distance predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments in synesthetic metaphors

This paper discusses a way of operationalizing metaphoricity quantitatively using a numerical measure of the semantic distance between two domains. We demonstrate the construct validity of this measure with respect to metaphoricity and creativity judgments in the domain of English synesthetic metaphors – expressions such as sweet melody and loud color that involve combinations of terms from conceptually distinct sensory modalities. In a pre-registered study, we find that a continuous measure of sensory modality difference predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments. While our results use synesthetic metaphors as a test case, it is possible to extend the application of our measure of semantic distance to other metaphorical expressions. In addition to demonstrating the utility of this measure, this work also demonstrates the utility of rating data in the domain of metaphor research