In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some 'and possibly all' dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("'Not all' dogs are mammals," known as a "scalar implicature"). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the…

This study focused on the cognitive abilities that contribute to creative metaphor generation. A concept explanation task was used to test conventional and novel (creative) metaphor generation. Conceptual fluency and similarities were measured using the Tel-Aviv Creativity Test (TACT). The main goal was to investigate how fluency of ideas and…

Whereas executive functions are known to be closely tied to successful language processing in children and younger adults, less is known about how age-related decline in these functions affects language processing in elderly adults. Because the abilities to use linguistic context and resolve potential ambiguities such as between an idiom's…

Children vary in their ability to use language in social contexts and this has important consequences for wellbeing. We review studies that test whether individual differences in pragmatic skill are associated with formal language ability, mentalizing, and executive functions in both typical and atypical development. The strongest and most…

The objectives of this study were to examine (a) differences in figurative language, analogical reasoning, executive functions (EF), theory of mind (ToM), and local/ central coherence (LCC) of children with high-functioning autism (HFA; n 32) and typically developing (TD; n 32) children; (b) improvement of figurative language using dynamic…

In this study, dynamic testing principles were applied to examine progression of analogy problem solving, the roles that cognitive flexibility and metacognition play in children's progression as well as training benefits, and instructional needs of 7- to 8-year-old gifted and average-ability children. Utilizing a pretest training posttest control…

The goal of the research was to examine executive functioning and figurative language comprehension among students with learning disabilities as compared to students without learning disabilities. As part of the research, we examined 20 students with learning disabilities and 21 students with no learning disabilities, both groups of students…

This research extends previous studies regarding the metaphoric competence of autistic and learning disabled children on different measures of visual and verbal non-literal language comprehension, as well as cognitive abilities that include semantic knowledge, executive functions, similarities, and reading fluency. Thirty seven children with…