Despite the ubiquity of dancing and synchronized movement to music, relatively few studies have examined cognitive representations of musical rhythm and meter among listeners from contrasting cultures. We aimed to disentangle the contributions of culture-general and culture-specific influences by examining American and Turkish listeners' detection of temporal disruptions (varying in size from 5...

Causality is a core concept of human cognition, but the extent to which cultural factors constrain, trigger, or shape the way in which humans think about causal relationships has barely been explored. This chapter summarizes empirical findings on the potential for cultural variability in the content of causal cognition, in the way this content is processed, and in the context in which all this ...

The well-respected tradition of research on concepts uses cross-cultural comparisons to explore which aspects of conceptual behavior are universal versus culturally variable. This work continues, but it is being supplemented by intensified efforts to study how conceptual systems and cultural systems interact to modify and support each other. For example, cultural studies within the framework of...

The vast majority of the work on culture and cognition has focused on cross-cultural comparisons, largely ignoring the dynamic aspects of culture. In this article, we provide a diachronic analysis of causal cognition over time. We hypothesized that the increased role of education, science, and technology in Western societies should be accompanied by greater attention to causal connections. To t...

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how...