Cognitive Linguistics

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Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, Neurosciences, Aphasia, Traumatic

Brain Injury, Williams Syndrome, Cerebellum, Language Disorders, Mutism

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Cognitive Linguistics
L. Talmy, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006

Developing over the past two to three decades, cognitive linguistics has as its central
concern the representation of conceptual structure in language. It thus addresses the
linguistic structuring of basic conceptual categories such as space and time, scenes
and events, entities and processes, motion and location, and force and causation.
To these it adds basic categories of cognition such as attention and perspective,
volition and intention, and expectation and affect. It addresses the interrelationships
of conceptual structures, such as those in metaphoric mapping, those within a
semantic frame, those between text and context, and those in the grouping of
conceptual categories into large structuring systems.

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Grammar: Functional Approaches

W. Croft, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

3.5 Cognitive Linguistics and Functionalism

Cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987/1991, Talmy 2000) is a broad
school of linguistic theory that is usually called functionalist. Cognitive linguistics,
as its name indicates, focuses on cognitive (semantic) explanations for grammatical
structure. Cognitive linguistics has contributed a number of ideas to other function-
alist approaches that are relevant to assessing functional approaches.
Cognitive linguistics has proposed a model of grammatical knowledge, construction
grammar, that offers an alternative to the formalist model in which form and
function (semantics and information structure) are separated in distinct compo-
nents. Construction grammar hypothesizes that knowledge of syntax involves the
knowledge of individual constructions which combine formal properties (syntactic
structures, morphological inflections) and functional ones (semantics and discourse
function). For example, the ditransitive construction [X Verb Z Y], as in Marilyn sent
Gina a book, specifies not only the syntactic structure of the construction but also
the semantic relationships among the participants, such as the fact that Z comes to
possess Y. Constructions are organized in a network of grammatical knowledge in
a speaker's mind. More broadly, grammatical knowledge is organized as a system
of signs or symbols, consisting of form (the signifier) and function (the signified). A
model organizing grammatical knowledge in terms of constructions/symbols/signs
allows for a direct statement of functional properties that are relevant to particular
grammatical constructions and other grammatical units.

Cognitive linguistics argues that semantics involves conceptualization or construal

of an experience by a speaker for the purposes of linguistic communication. For
example, an English count noun can be used in a mass noun grammatical context,
as in There was a huge Buick there; just acres of car (attested example). The noun car,
normally denoting an individuatable object, is construed to denote an unbounded
quality (size). These and other examples indicate that the English count noun-mass
noun distinction has at least some semantic basis. Cognitive linguists also accept
that some alternative construals are conventionalized, such as chicken (meat, mass
noun) vs. chicken (live bird; count noun). Nevertheless, the conventionalized gram-
matical distinction conforms to the semantics of count noun vs. mass noun: a live
bird is an individuatable entity, while meat is a unbounded substance.

Conventionalized construals are of course partly arbitrary (see below); but the
semantic regularity of both conventional and novel construals has led cognitive
linguists to argue that even grammatical categories such as ‘noun’ and ‘subject’
are susceptible to a cognitive semantic explanation. That is, a grammatical category
such as ‘noun’ encodes a construal of an entity in a certain way, which can be
discerned by the occurrence of particular word roots directly as nouns, and in the
semantic changes that occur when a non-noun root is used as a noun, or can be
morphologically derived as a noun.

Finally, cognitive linguistics has developed a model of categorization which has in

turn been exploited by functionalist linguists. A classical view of meaning is that the
meaning of a word, inflection or grammatical category must be a single definition
that will cover all and only the appropriate uses of the word or category. Cognitive
linguists have argued that many word and category meanings can be described in
terms of polysemy, that is, distinct but semantically related meanings. For example,
the meaning of over in The bird flew over the hill (path of motion) is distinct from its
meaning in The house is over the hill (location), but they are related systematically.
More specifically, cognitive linguists (drawing on research by psychologists) have
suggested that many polysemous categories have one meaning that can be consid-
ered central or basic, called the category's prototype. Cognitive and other functionally
oriented linguists have argued that many if not all grammatical categories are in
fact polysemous, and many of these categories have a semantic/discourse-functional
prototype which is found to be valid across languages (see Linguistics: Prototype
Theory).

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Metaphor: Stylistic Approaches

G. Steen, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006

History
The cognitive-linguistic approach emphasizes the cognitive and systematic nature
of metaphor and therefore highlights its ubiquity and conventionality. This is an
encompassing, linguistic approach, which does not take metaphor as just a stylistic
device in the rhetorical sense of the term. To many scholars, the cognitive-linguistic
approach has replaced older views of metaphor, which used to limit metaphor to
the rhetorical phenomenon – that is, to those metaphors that are active – thereby
drawing attention to their deviance as well as to the probability that they are delib-
erate. The cognitive-linguistic view argues in particular that it has taken over from
the conceptualization prevailing in the 1960s, of metaphor as necessarily involving
grammatical deviance, research showing that many metaphorical expressions in
language are not deviant but rather are the norm. Similarly, not all metaphors
uncovered by the cognitive-linguistic approach require pragmatic inferencing, as
was argued in the 1970s by John Searle and H. P. Grice, but may be understood
with reference to conventionalized semantic mappings. The best overview of these
different positions is still provided by Ortony (1993).

Another series of issues that has been important in the history of metaphor is
the debate over the questions of whether metaphor is a matter of substituting a
metaphorical expression for another, presumably literal one; whether it is a matter
of comparison between unlike phenomena; or whether it is a matter of interaction
between two distinct ideas (for an overview, see, e.g., Gibbs (1994)). Modern devel-
opments in cognitive linguistics have come to take a liberal view of the notion of
correspondences in metaphor as a cross-domain mapping. This now includes both
pre-existing and perceived similarity between phenomena (comparison), and inter-
action between conceptual structures (interaction), as is, for instance, summarized
by Kövecses (2002) in his cognitive-linguistic introduction to the field. This broader
view of metaphor in cognitive linguistics goes back as far as the classic position of
Aristotle, who also saw metaphor as based in correspondences. At the same time, the
new view re-establishes contact with the widespread structuralist views of metaphor
as based in similarity, versus metonymy as based in contiguity (cf. Barcelona, 2000;
Dirven and Pörings, 2002; Panther and Radden, 1999). It has led to new questions
about the analysis of many metaphorical expressions. For instance, do we see time
as money (metaphor) or do we see time via or through money (metonymy)?

A third historical issue has to do with the terminology for metaphor analysis.
Cognitive linguistics and other cognitive scientific approaches of metaphor have in-
troduced the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ domains, whereby the source
domain includes the knowledge of the metaphorically used concepts and words and
the target domain includes the knowledge of the nonmetaphorically used concepts
and words. These terms are now in competition with the traditional terminology,
which calls the source domain the ‘vehicle’ and the target domain the ‘tenor.’ Yet
another tradition talks about the source domain vocabulary as the metaphor ‘focus,’
and the target domain vocabulary is regarded as the ‘frame.’ Thus, in an expression
such as Time is money, ‘time’ is called the tenor or a term from the target domain
and ‘money’ is called the vehicle or a term from the source domain; ‘money’ is the
focus, whereas ‘time is …’ is called the frame. It is not clear which terminological
tradition will prevail.

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Language, Visual Cognition and Motor

Action
R.A. Zwaan, M. Kaschak, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edi-
tion), 2006

Perceptual Processes and Representations in Language Com-

prehension
Researchers in cognitive linguistics have long argued that linguistic meaning is
rooted in perceptual processes (e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987). Consider a
sentence such as, ‘The cord runs from my laptop to the cable modem.’ This sentence
conveys a visual scan path from the laptop to the modem. The alternative wording,
‘The cord runs to the cable modem from my laptop’ sounds odd because it conveys
an interrupted scan path, followed by another one (see Langacker, 2005, for a
discussion). Consider also the sentence, ‘The book is on my desk in my office on
the fourth floor of the Longmire building.’ Several variants of this sentence can be
constructed that are all equally grammatical. One example is, ‘The book is in the
Longmire building on the fourth floor in my office on my desk.’ However, some
variants are awkward. ‘The book is in the Longmire building on my desk on the fourth
floor in my office,’ sounds awkward because it does not convey a linear zooming-in
or zooming-out process.

Brain-imaging studies have provided evidence that the processing of words engages
the cortical and subcortical structures that are active when the words' referents are
perceived. When subjects name words referring to actions associated with objects,
brain areas just anterior to areas active during motion perception are activated,
and when words referring to colors are processed, sites just anterior to areas active
during color perception are activated (see Martin and Chao, 2001, for a review).
Also, negative emotion words engage the amygdala, which is active when negative
emotions are being experienced (Isenberg et al., 2000). This evidence is consistent
with the idea that words activate memory traces of perceptual experiences regarding
the words' referents.

Behavioral evidence has provided further evidence that language and perception are
closely intertwined. Subjects tend to make horizontal eye movements when listen-
ing to narratives describing horizontal motion and vertical eye movements when
listening to narratives describing vertical motion (Spivey and Geng, 2001). Readers
routinely activate the shape and orientation of objects described in sentences (Stan-
field and Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan et al., 2002). For example, on reading ‘He saw the egg
in the carton,’ people name a picture of a whole egg more quickly than they do a
picture of a broken egg, whereas the reverse is true on reading ‘He saw the egg in
the frying pan.’ There also is evidence that visual primes affect subsequent language
processing (Boroditksy, 2000) and that visual displays presented concurrently with
linguistic input may create interference (Fincher-Kiefer, 2000).

To summarize, linguistic analyses, brain-imaging studies, and behavioral exper-

iments all converge on the conclusion that there is a close connection between
language and perceptual processes. The argument can be made that meaning arises
in part out of the perceptual simulations of the referential situation rather than out of
the manipulation of abstract, arbitrary, amodal symbols (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg,
1997; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005; Zwaan, 2004). The qualification ‘in part’ is important,
because meaning does not just arise out of the language-mediated activation of
perceptual representations and processes. Consider the sentence, ‘John pounded
the nail into the wall.’ If the embodied view is correct, understanding this sentence
involves not only the visual representation of a horizontal nail (Stanfield and Zwaan,
2001) but also an activation of motor representations and processes involved in
pounding nails. In other words, the hypothesis is that meaning arises out of the
simulation of actions in addition to the simulation of perceptions.

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Cognitive Semantics
J.R. Taylor, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006

The Usage-Basis of Cognitive Semantics

Langacker has described cognitive linguistics as a ‘usage-based’ approach. The claim
can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, it could be a statement about
the methodology of cognitive linguistic research. Usage-based research would be
research based on authentic data, as documented in a corpus, recorded in the
field, or elicited in controlled situations, rather than on invented, constructed data.
Although different researchers might prefer different methodologies, a glance at
practically any publication by leading figures in the field, such as Lakoff, Langacker,
and Talmy, will show that cognitive linguistics, as a movement, cannot reasonably
be said to be ‘usage-based’ in this sense.

On a second interpretation, usage-based refers to the presumed nature of linguistic

knowledge and the manner in which it is acquired, mentally represented, and
accessed. The claim, namely, is that a language is learned ‘bottom-up’ through
exposure to usage events. A usage event presents the language user/learner with
an actual vocalization in association with a fine-grained, context-dependent con-
ceptualization. Acquisition proceeds through generalization over usage events. Nec-
essarily, many of the context-dependent particularities of the usage events will be
filtered out, leaving only a schematic representation of both the phonology and the
semantics. In this respect, cognitive linguistics contrasts strikingly with ‘top-down’
theories of acquisition, whereby the basic ‘architecture’ of a language is presumed
to be genetically given, exposure to usage data being needed merely to trigger the
appropriate settings of innately given parameters.

The usage-based approach raises two questions, which have loomed large in cog-
nitive semantics research. These concern (a) the units over which schematization
occurs, and (b) the extent of schematization. Let us first consider the second of these
issues.

One of the most vibrant areas of cognitive semantic research has been the study of
lexical polysemy. It is a common observation that words exhibit a range of different
meanings according to the contexts in which they are used. Indeed, the extent of
polysemy appears to be roughly proportional to the frequency with which a word is
used. Not surprisingly, among the most highly polysemous words in English are the
prepositions.

Consider the preposition on. Given such uses as the book on the table and the cat on
the mat, it is easy to see how a schematic, de-contextualized image of the on-relation
could emerge. It involves locating one object with respect to another in terms of
such aspects as contact, verticality, and support. But the preposition has many other
uses, as exemplified by the fly on the ceiling, the picture on the wall, the leaves on the
tree, the writing on the blackboard, the washing on the clothes-line, the shoes on my feet,
the ring on my finger. Do we proceed with further abstraction and schematization,
coming up with a characterization of the on-relation that is compatible with all of
these uses? Or do we identify a set of discrete meanings, which we may then attempt
to relate in a prototype or a family resemblance category? If we adopt this latter
approach, another question arises, namely, just how many distinct meanings are to
be postulated. Three? Ten? Several dozen? Do we want to say that the water on the
floor and the cat on the mat exemplify different senses of on, on the grounds that the
relation between cat and mat is not quite the same as that between the water and
the floor? Needless to say, the issue becomes even more critical when we take into
consideration the vast range of nonspatial uses of the preposition: on television, be
on a diet, be on drugs, on Monday, and countless more.

In general, as is consistent with a usage-based orientation, cognitive semanticists

have tended to focus on the particularities of low-level generalizations, an approach
that has frequently been censured for the ‘polysemy explosion’ that it engenders.
Nevertheless, the role of more schematic representations is not denied. Langacker,
in this connection, draws attention to the ‘rule-list fallacy.’ The fallacy resides in the
notion that rules (high-level generalizations), once acquired, necessarily expunge
knowledge of the lower-level generalizations on whose basis the rules have been
abstracted. It is entirely plausible that high- and low-level generalizations might
co-exist in the mental grammar.

Indeed, knowledge of low-level generalizations – not too far removed, in terms of

their schematicity, from actually encountered usage-events – may be needed in order
to account for speakers' fluency in their language. The topic interacts with a more
general issue, namely, the relative roles of ‘computation’ vs. ‘storage’ in language
knowledge and language use. Humans are not generally very good at computation,
but we are quite adept at storing and retrieving specific information. Consider
arithmetical operations. We can, to be sure, compute the product of 12 by 12 by
applying general rules, but the process is slow and laborious and subject to error,
and some people may need the help of pencil and paper. It is far easier, quicker,
and more reliable to access the ready-made solution, if we have learned it, namely,
that 12 × 12 = 144. The point of the analogy is that in order for speech production
and understanding to proceed smoothly and rapidly, it may well be the case that we
access ready-made patterns and preformed chunks, which have been learned in their
specific detail, even though these larger units could be assembled in accordance with
general principles. The role of formulaic language in fluency and idiomaticity has
been investigated especially by linguists engaged in corpus-based lexicography and
second language acquisition research. Their findings lend support to the view that
linguistic knowledge may indeed be represented at a relatively low level. We might
suppose, therefore, that the ring on my finger is judged to be acceptable, not because
some highly schematic, underspecified sense of on has been contextually elaborated,
nor because some rather specific sense of on has been selected, but simply because
speakers have encountered, and learned, such an expression.

These considerations lead into the second aspect of a usage-based model: what
are the units over which schematization takes place? The study of lexical seman-
tics has typically been based on the assumption that schematization takes place
over word-sized units. Indeed, the above discussion was framed in terms of how
many meanings the preposition on might have. The study of idioms and related
phenomena, such as collocations, constructions, and formulaic expressions, casts
doubt on the validity of this assumption. Corpus-based studies, in particular, have
drawn attention to the fact that words may need to be characterized in terms of
the constructions in which they occur, conversely, that constructions need to be
characterized in terms of the words that are eligible to occur in them. It might be
inappropriate, therefore, to speak of the ‘mental lexicon,’ understood as a list of
words with their phonological and semantic properties. A more appropriate concept
might be the ‘mental phrasicon,’ or the ‘mental contructicon.’ It would certainly be
consistent with a usage-based model to assume that language is represented as
schematizations over the units in terms of which language is encountered – not
individual words as such, but phrases, constructions, and even utterance-length
units.

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Direct Effects of Genetic Mental Retar-

dation Syndromes: Maladaptive Behav-
ior and Psychopathology
Elisabeth M. Dykens, in International Review of Research in Mental Retardation,
1999

2 PERSONALITY/PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
In contrast to work on cognitive-linguistic profiles, studies have yet to fully examine
the personality or psychiatric features of people with Williams syndrome. Early de-
scriptions of people with Williams syndrome hinted at a “classic” Williams syndrome
personality, described as pleasant, unusually friendly, affectionate, loquacious, en-
gaging, and interpersonally sensitive and charming (e.g., Dilts, Morris, & Leonard,
1990). Such qualities may change over the course of development, with adults being
more withdrawn and less overly friendly than children (Gosch & Pankau, 1997).

Recent findings from our ongoing work on Williams syndrome expand these ob-
servations. Using the Reiss Personality Profiles (Reiss & Havercamp, 1998), we find
that relative to controls, adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome are more
likely to approach others, to draw attention to themselves, and to empathize with
the positive and negative feelings of others (Dykens & Rosner, in press). At the same
time, however, these subjects did not fare well making or keeping friends, and were
often dangerously indiscriminate in their relating to others.

Indeed, although sociability in Williams syndrome has generally been viewed as

a strength, these features also seem to reflect the type of social disinhibition
that is characteristic of people who are anxious, impulsive, and overly aroused.
Not surprisingly, salient problems in Williams syndrome include hyperactivity and
inattentiveness, and a proneness for ADHD that may diminish with age (Gosch &
Pankau, 1997; Pober & Dykens, 1996). Generalized anxiety, worry, and perseverative
thinking are also commonly seen (e.g., Einfeld, Tonge, & Florio, 1997), and people
with Williams syndrome appear to show unusually high levels of fears and phobias
(Dykens, 1999). Relative to suitably matched controls, fears in persons with Williams
syndrome are more frequent, wide-ranging, and severe, and they are also associated
with impaired social-adaptive adjustment (Dykens, 1999). In addition to anxiety and
fears, some young adults with Williams syndrome struggle with depression, sadness,
and low self-esteem (Pober & Dykens, 1996).

Sociable personalities and strengths in facial recognition tasks suggest a low prob-
ability of psychiatric disorders in the Williams syndrome population involving an
inability to read social cues, such as autism or PDD-NOS (see Dykens & Volkmar,
1997, for a review). It is unknown how cognitive-linguistic or personality profiles
might mediate the expression of other difficulties associated with Williams
syndrome, including anxiety, fears, depression, inattention, and hyperactivity.

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Style
P. Verdonk, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006
Cognitive Stylistics (Also Called Cognitive Poetics)
One of the valuable spinoffs from cognitive linguistic research is cognitive stylistics,
also called cognitive poetics. It is an interdisciplinary study of how readers process
literary texts, or perhaps better still, ‘of what happens when a reader reads a literary
text’ (Stockwell, 2002: 5). Probably the main reason many students of style find fresh
inspiration in cognitive linguistics is that this approach does not regard language as
a separate and independent cognitive faculty, as it is assumed to be in Chomskyan
linguistics. On the contrary, cognitive linguists hold that there is a close interactive
and meaningful relationship between linguistic and other cognitive abilities, which
include thinking, imagination, learning, memory, perception, attention, emotion,
reasoning, and problem solving. All these abilities enable humans to survive and
make sense of the world around them. From this it follows that cognitive linguistics
is thoroughly experiential from a physical, social, cultural, ideological, and emotive
point of view.

To put it differently, cognitive linguists seek to explain the formal manifestations of

language not only in terms of the cognitive abilities that are their plausible providers,
but also in terms of the communicative or discursive functions that such empowered
language structures perform (Taylor, 2002: 8–9). Yet another source of inspiration
for stylistics and poetics is that cognitive linguistics was (and still is) developed in
relation to other cognitive sciences, such as cognitive anthropology, psychology, psy-
cholinguistics, and artificial intelligence. This interdisciplinary approach has yielded
completely new concepts, theories, and ideas that will enable students of style and
poetics to analyze, describe, and rationalize ‘the effects of literary texts on the mind
of the reader.’ See Gavins and Steen (2003: 2).

In addition to the foregoing cognitive analyses and interpretations of metaphor,

metonymy, and other rhetorical figures, cognitive stylistics and poetics also draw
on other cognitive concepts, such as schema theory and frames for research into
readers’ comprehension of texts (Semino, 1997; Emmott, 1997), the concept of
figure and ground to account for readers’ response to foregrounding (Emmott, 2002;
Stockwell, 2002), and a lot of other theoretical concepts from the cognitive sciences
that cannot be discussed here because of lack of space. The following collections of
essays deal with a wide variety of examples of how cognitive stylistics and poetics
can be fruitfully combined with theories and insights from cognitive linguistics and
other cognitive disciplines: Csábi and Zerkowitz (2002), Gavins and Steen (2003),
and Semino and Culpeper (2002), which all show how the cognitive sciences have
breathed new life into stylistics and poetics.

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Communication and Swallowing Im-
pairments in Brain Cancer
Marilyn Frost Rubenstein MA, CCC-SLP, Brittany Schenke-Reilly MA, CCC-SLP,
CBIS, in Central Nervous System Cancer Rehabilitation, 2019

Abstract
Rehabilitation of speech, language, cognitive-linguistic, and swallowing impair-
ments due to brain cancer is facilitated by the speech-language pathologist in a
variety of rehabilitative settings. Initial and ongoing assessment through formal
and informal evaluation takes into consideration previous level of functioning and
factors such as age, level of education, and anticipated discharge goals. Treatment
and prognosis are influenced by, among other factors, site of lesion, postoperative
changes, and existence of co-morbidities. These factors may be confounded by
the effects of radiation and chemotherapy. Favorable outcomes are best achieved
through a multidisciplinary team approach. Ongoing research is fundamental to
maximizing therapy outcomes and improving quality of life in the care of patients
with brain tumors.

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Aphasia-Related Disorders
Edith Kaplan, ... Guila Glosser, in Acquired Aphasia (Third Edition), 1998

Cognitive Components of Writing

Writing depends on the same central linguistic cognitive components as those dis-
cussed for reading, as well as other components specific to the production of letters.
In writing to dictation, auditory analysis first decomposes inputs into phonological
units that can be matched to representations of familiar auditory word patterns in
the phonological lexicon. Processing then proceeds either to activate corresponding
letter patterns in the orthographic lexicon or to activate associated meanings in the
semantic lexicon. Thus when writing to dictation, the orthographic representations
may be accessed either directly from the phonological lexicon or after the word’s
meaning is accessed in the semantic lexicon. In spontaneous writing, ideational
concepts can activate lexical semantic information. This information can also be
accessed through sensory systems, as occurs during visual or tactile written naming.
Once accessed, semantic information activates the associated orthography.

Written output of the orthographic patterns requires further processing through

several “peripheral” transformations that are specific to writing. The graphemic or
orthographic buffer refers to a working memory process that maintains the spelling
code in a temporary buffer while the physical or allographic forms of the letters
are selected for written output or the letter names are accessed for oral spelling.
Graphic motor patterns specify the production of letter shapes corresponding to the
orthographic code.

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The Mathematical Brain Across the

Lifespan
I.M. Lyons, ... D. Ansari, in Progress in Brain Research, 2016

7 Conclusions
Scientists from several different fields (cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience,
and linguistics) have used a variety of methods to study how we represent numerical
information (both in symbolic and nonsymbolic formats). The study of numeri-
cal and mathematical processing is a thriving field, as is aptly illustrated by the
contributions in this volume. This research has led to significant advances in
our understanding of how numbers are processed and represented. However, the
majority of this research has focused on the “how many” question (understanding
how the cardinality of numbers is processed and represented). In contrast to the
predominant focus on how the cardinality of numbers is represented and processed,
there has been comparatively less work on the representation and processing of
numerical order.

This state-of-the-art, however, is changing. In recent years, a growing body of

evidence from both behavioral and neuroimaging studies with nonhuman primates,
human children, and adults has begun to more systematically investigate numerical
order processing from a wide range of different theoretical approaches, using a
variety of methodological toolkits. In an effort to summarize and integrate this
evidence, the aim of the present review was to provide a comprehensive discussion
of what is currently known about the processing and representation of numerical
order and what future directions in research on numerical order may be particularly
fruitful.
 As should be evident from the earlier review, one overarching conclusion is that
numerical order processing is complex and multifaceted. Specifically, it is becoming
increasingly clear that numerical order processing is, at least partially, distinct
from the processing of cardinality: It follows different developmental trajectories, is
uniquely associated with individual differences in higher-level numerical and math-
ematical skills, and is underpinned by different neural mechanisms. This conclusion
demonstrates that the study of numerical order processing should be given greater
attention. Furthermore, there are clearly relationships between the processing of
numerical and nonnumerical order at both behavioral and brain levels of analyses;
the mechanisms for processing ordinal sequences in other domains very likely play
a role in numerical ordinal processing as well. However, the evidence remains
incomplete as to whether numerical ordinal processing is completely reducible to
these domain- or stimulus-general processes. Put differently, we do not yet know
whether numerical order is “merely” the artifact of other types of ordinal processing
but instead possesses unique features. Here, we have suggested answering this
question may depend critically on the type of mechanism—for instance short- vs
long-term memory—in question. Regardless, it is clear that further research is need-
ed to either identify the more general ordinal processes that contribute to numerical
ordering and what, if any, features may distinguish numerical from other types
of ordinal processing. Importantly, it is also clear that numerical order processing
differs between symbolic and nonsymbolic processing and thereby suggests that
numerical order processing may be a key differentiator between the two.

This leads to the suggestion—put forward in the present review—that numer-

ical order allows for symbolic representation of number to be less tied to the
cardinalities they represent. Instead, numerical order provides a means by which
ordinal representations go beyond item–item association and toward a network of
associative links that allow humans to process numbers for which they have no
perceptual experience of their cardinal values (eg, a billion). In this way, symbolic
numerical order processing may reveal much about how symbolic representations of
number have both enabled humans to outstrip the numerical abilities of nonhuman
primates, and contributed to the complexity of mathematical thinking.

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