Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. Hahn and Oaksford (2007) argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments…

Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with…

Bowdle and Gentner (2005) proposed a reconciliation of the comparison and categorization models of metaphor comprehension. Their career of metaphor model posits that, as a metaphorical term becomes more conventional, its mode of processing shifts from comparison to categorization. However, other recent studies (Chiappe, Kennedy, & Chiappe, 2003;…