Divining meaning in the world around us and integrating that into the stories we tell about who we are and what motivates us is essential to both our cognitive processing and overall well-being. At the same time, our conscious processes are dependent on inputs from our social and physical environment for the raw materials needed to develop…

One of the central challenges educators face today, especially in higher education, is the gap between warranted (domain-specific) knowledge and the prior beliefs students hold about certain concepts and phenomena (preconceptions). In the Internet age, students often self-directedly acquire knowledge from an increasingly large number of…

Currently, modelling of knowledge and skills in a MOOC and the associated instructional and pedagogical engineering process is a major challenge in order to support designers and facilitate learning. This article explains how visuo-cognitive metaphors of the "metro map" and "travel" make possible the design of connections…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Describes the results of two studies indicating that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idiomatic expressions, and that people are automatically biased toward interpreting such language as idioms before deriving their intended literal meanings. (HTH)

A study investigated the immediate comprehension processes involved in the interpretation of English idiomatic expressions. Idioms such as "bury the hatchet" were presented to 48 college students in sentential contexts that either biased the subject toward a literal or a figurative interpretation or left the interpretation ambiguous. In control…

Defends the role of humanities instruction in the education of engineering undergraduates in the areas of problem solving, risk taking, and the synthesis of metaphors and symbols. (AEA)

The three dominant views of metaphor emphasize comparison anomaly or dissimilarity, and a somewhat vaguer notion that combines aspects of the first two, called conceptual interaction. In all three views, a central consideration as to the aptness of the metaphor is the similarity of the objects linked by the metaphor (tenor and vehicle). The exact…

Examines the relations among general language competency factors such as word knowledge, comprehension, and paradigmatic/syntagmatic reasoning, and college developmental readers' ability to interpret two text formats designed to elicit either a literal or figurative interpretation. (DF)

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…