In this article, we contend that in media stories on the science of reading, journalists have relied on strategic metaphorical framing to present reading education as a public crisis with a narrow and settled solution. Drawing on data from a critical metaphor analysis of 37 media stories, we demonstrate how frames used in recent media reporting…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Debates about how to teach reading have continuingly aligned with political agendas in the United States. In this article, we reveal ways in which educational journalism uses metaphor to align the "science of reading" with values and beliefs held by conservative Christian religious groups. Through a critical metaphor analysis of 24…

In this review, the authors interrogate the recent identity turn in literacy studies by asking, How do particular views of identity shape how researchers think about literacy and, conversely, how does the view of literacy taken by a researcher shape meanings made about identity? To address this question, the authors review various ways of…

The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like "Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien" by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown…

Explores whether the interpretation of figurative passages presents a comprehension problem different from that of any difficult text. Indicates that although some abilities important in processing isolated figurative expressions carry over to figurative passage interpretation, these figurative-unique abilities can not definitively account for the…

Finds that the most common type of figurative language in fourth- and sixth-grade basal readers is personification. Overall, the most commonly used figures of speech are: personification; animal, sense, and inanimate metaphors; and hyperbole. (FL)

Through a series of three studies, the facilitative effect of metaphors on children's recall of expository passages was evaluated. Data supports the view that metaphors can serve the function of bridging new and old information in unfamiliar textual settings. (HOD)

Context-dependent metaphoric sentences of literally equivalent paraphrases were used as concluding statements for short didactic passages to investigate whether metaphors help or hinder prose comprehension. Adult participants' recall protocols indicated increased memorability for passages with metaphoric conclusions. (Author/LC)

Structure mapping theory is a way of characterizing analogies and certain classes of metaphors. The central claim of this paper is that all analogies and many metaphors are fundamentally devices for mapping relational structures from one domain to another. This theory differs from other theories in postulating that the interpretation rules for…

A study examined basal readers and trade books in terms of reading ease as estimated by readability formulas and the incidence of figurative language. Based on an earlier study, the study had three major goals: to (1) assess and compare two reading series ("A" and "B") at each of two grade levels; (2) assess and compare…

A total of 411 elementary school children seven to twelve years old read short prose passages and selected the most appropriate continuation sentence from four alternatives. The completion sentences were constructed so that the correct (target) response involved either an explicit (simile) or an implicit (metaphor) metaphorical comparison. It was…

Defining metaphor as "seeing a concept from one class in terms of a concept from another class," a study was devised that analyzed the degree to which two concepts occupy dissimilar positions with respect to their category or domain (within-domain distance), and the degree to which categories themselves are dissimilar (between-domain distance).…

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…

Presents results of a study of fifth-grade students' ability to interpret novel metaphors and similes when provided with a subschemata of semantic attributes. (AEA)