Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and
spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world …

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the
brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal …

Abstract Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it
apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over …

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that
support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word …

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a
language. Cross‐linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable …

Recent research has shown that semantic category systems, such as color and kinship
terms, find an optimal balance between simplicity and informativeness. We argue that this …

It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This
hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language …

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive
psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be …

Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (eg, speaker,
addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person …

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn
(Typological Prevalence Hypothesis; TPH). Prior work supports this idea in phonology …