Previous studies have found a positive relationship between exposure to fiction and interpersonal sensitivity. However, it is unclear whether exposure to different genres of fiction may be differentially related to these outcomes for readers. The current study investigated the role of four fiction genres (i.e., Domestic Fiction, Romance, Science-Fiction/Fantasy, and Suspense/Thriller) in the re...

Languages vary in the types of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish. The results show that focus and givenness in Polish are both marked prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Polish patterns like English in showing prosodic focus marking in a broa...

Understanding language evolution in terms of cultural transmission across generations of language users raises the possibility that some of the processes that have shaped language evolution can also be observed in historical language change. In this paper, we explore how constraints on production may affect the cultural evolution of language by analyzing the emergence of the Romance languages f...

This paper deals with perceptual identification and differentiation of five Romance languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Previous studies have investigated human capability to identify spoken samples in unknown languages after a relatively brief exposure. Moreover, they have shown that subjects use perceptual categories and adapt foreign categories to their own c...