Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Much research indicates that concepts of magnitude and valence are represented spatially, with more/less and posi-tive/negative relations mapped to vertical and horizontal axes. While these mappings are sometimes manifested linguisticallythrough conventional metaphors (e.g., ”prices fell”), recent evidence suggests that they may be built into the very forms ofwords – traditionally assumed to be arbitrarily related to their meanings. Following previous research, we examined whetherthe directions of hand motions constituting words in two sign languages predicted the meanings of their English translationequivalents. Upward-moving signs were more positively valenced than downward-moving signs, as found previously, but werealso greater in magnitude, or intensity. Additionally, rightward-moving signs (from the signer’s perspective) were more posi-tively valenced than leftward-moving signs, consistent with the bodily experience of right-handers. Our findings demonstratesystematic encoding of multiple spatial-conceptual mappings in words, adding to the growing literature showing non-arbitrarylinks between linguistic form and meaning.