How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…

This study investigated the situation of teaching and learning idioms at a university level in Vietnam, a foreign language context. It also examined the evaluation of the idiom teaching process in three language classes over a 15-week period for pre-service teachers of English. The data were collected though questionnaires, in-depth interviews and…

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…

Instead of being completely arbitrary, the meaning of many idioms is "motivated" by their original, literal usage. In an FLT context, this offers the possibility of presenting idioms in ways that promote insightful learning rather than "blind" memorization. Associating an idiom with its etymology has been shown to enhance retention. This effect…

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…

To investigate the hypothesis that cognitive rules govern writing behavior, Carter's signaled stopping technique was used to study language and cognitive effects in public relations messages. Principles from Grunig, et al (1985) Axiomatic Theory of Cognition and Writing, which proposed premises, axioms and definitions about writing, were applied…

A multiple choice Metaphor Preferences Test was administered to 138 preschool through college subjects to determine the role of a metaphor's ground in determining a metaphor's appeal, and to document the evolution of preferences for different types of grounds. Ground is the common property that links the two terms of a metaphor (topic and…

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…