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Canal, Paolo; Pesciarelli, Francesca; Vespignani, Francesco; Molinaro, Nicola; Cacciari, Cristina – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2017
We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., "break the ice") are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Language Processing, Diagnostic Tests, Brain Hemisphere Functions
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Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2015
Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…
Descriptors: Eye Movements, Experiments, Sentence Structure, Verbs
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Patson, Nikole D.; Warren, Tessa – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2010
In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology…
Descriptors: Reading Comprehension, Sentences, Phrase Structure, Nouns
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Klepousniotou, Ekaterini; Titone, Debra; Romero, Carolina – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008
Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged…
Descriptors: Semantics, Figurative Language, Comprehension
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Huang, Yi Ting; Gordon, Peter C. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011
How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…
Descriptors: Comprehension, Eye Movements, Figurative Language, Human Body
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Tabossi, Patrizia; Fanari, Rachele; Wolf, Kinou – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008
Three experiments tested the main claims of the idiom decomposition hypothesis: People have clear intuitions on the semantic compositionality of idiomatic expressions, which determines the syntactic behavior of these expressions and how they are recognized. Experiment 1 showed that intuitions are clear only for a very restricted number of…
Descriptors: Language Patterns, Semantics, Semiotics, Language Processing
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Pexman, Penny M.; Hino, Yasushi; Lupker, Stephen J. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2004
An ambiguity disadvantage (slower responses for ambiguous words, e.g., bank, than for unambiguous words) has been reported in semantic tasks (L. R. Gottlob, S. D. Goldinger, G. O. Stone, & G. C. Van Orden, 1999; Y. Hino, S. J. Lupker, & P. M. Pexman, 2002; C. D. Piercey & S. Joordens, 2000) and has been attributed to the meaning activation…
Descriptors: Semantics, Word Recognition, Figurative Language, Decision Making
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McNamara, Danielle S.; McDaniel, Mark A. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2004
In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Sentences, Inhibition, Reading Skills
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Woollams, Anna M. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2005
A current area of controversy within the literature on visual word recognition concerns the extent to which semantic information influences the computation of phonology. Experiment 1 revealed that both the imageability effect and the ambiguity advantage seen in the speeded naming task are confined to words with atypical mappings between spelling…
Descriptors: Semantics, Phonology, Figurative Language, Word Recognition