The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…

Examines definitions and suggests examples of types of figurative language to which students may usefully be exposed in the course of their learning. The article discusses implications for the teaching of figurative language and presents sample materials representing different strategies for helping students understand and generate figurative…

While researchers have made progress in understanding metaphor comprehension, less is known about the production of metaphoric language. College students (N=129) were asked to use metaphoric comparisons to describe 16 topics. They were told to imagine themselves on a trip, writing home to someone they knew well, either a peer or a child (students…

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. In experiment one, the target sentences followed either short or long contexts which induced either literal interpretations or metaphorical ones. Results indicated that only in the short context…

In a study of beliefs and construction of knowledge, undergraduate and graduate education students responded to open- ended statements and a list of similes describing what teachers, students, and classrooms were like. Results suggests that the simile list responses were valid reflections of the subjects' personal metaphors. (32 references)…