"A Dictionary of Contemporary Figurative Language" is meant to be an appendix to an earlier, more comprehensive work: ED648945, "A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2024." This appendix simply updates the dictionary of that previous work to better reflect the language used during the 2024…

Lessons designed to teach reading and listening typically concentrate on the use of higher-level skills and strategies, such as predicting, scanning, inferencing, understanding text structure, or activating background knowledge. Given that these normal communication skills are already available to students for mother-tongue use, they should…

The shift towards communicative language teaching in recent decades has created pressure towards individualized pedagogy that arises from the diversity found within any group of learners. One of the richest areas of diversity in target language needs across learners is the lexis of the various discourse communities that different learners are…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Bob McMurray for pioneering research on speech and language processing in infants and adults. McMurray has conducted influential work on the graded nature of…

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who…

Since "multicompetence" was proposed by Cook, there have been debates about the nature of distinction between monocompetence and multicompetence, the distinctiveness of languages in the mind and the homogeneity of language knowledge across speakers and contexts. The paper will address these issues from a linguistic perspective and make an attempt…

The paper advocates an approach to learning design that considers it as creating digital artefacts that can be extended, modified and used for different purposes. This is realised through an "act becoming artefact" cycle, where users' actions in the authors' software environment, named Learning Designer, are automatically interpreted on…

Retrieving a word in a sentence requires speakers to overcome syntagmatic, as well as paradigmatic interference. When accessing "cat" in "The cat chased the string", not only are similar competitors such as "dog" and "cap" activated, but also other words in the planned sentence, such as "chase" and "string". We hypothesise that both types of…

Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind handles language. There is some lack of consensus as to how far the scope of the field extends, but this article focuses on its most central concerns, namely, how language is acquired, how it is stored in the mind, and how it is processed in use. It aims to build bridges to some of the more important…

Describes lexical influences on selective adaptation using words with ambiguous phonemes as adapters. (Author/VWL)

Plaut and Booth developed a distributed connectionist model of written word comprehension and evaluated it against empirical findings on individual and developmental differences in semantic priming in visual lexical decision. Borowsky and Besner raised a number of challenges for this model. First, the model was not shown to be capable of…

This paper examines the semantic associations of words found in the business lexical environment by using a one-million word corpus of both spoken and written Business English. The key method of analysis is that of semantic prosody or semantic association; the notion that words associate with collocates that are themselves related, often either…

Verbs of motion and location in Irish Sign Language have a characteristic lexicalization pattern, which influences the lexical choices signers make in denoting the motion and location of entities. Perceived characteristics of referents govern the type of verb root selected. Animate and inanimate referents are signified by different types of verb…

The apparent difficulty of students of French as a second language to acquire French vocabulary is examined, drawing on experience with teaching Irish university students and the structures and stylistic traits peculiar to French. It is noted that while certain kinds of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) occupy little space in text, they take…

Focuses on natural language processing (NLP) in information retrieval. Defines the seven levels at which people extract meaning from text/spoken language. Discusses the stages of information processing; how an information retrieval system works; advantages to adding full NLP to information retrieval systems; and common problems with information…