Background: Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with…

The present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), and normal control individuals to access, in sentential biasing contexts, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., ''punch''), metonymies (e.g., ''rabbit''), and metaphors (e.g.,…

Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with…

Assumptions about comprehension of utterances are challenged in two experiments using as an example the verb phrase "to do a Richard Nixon on a tape" (i.e., erase it). It is argued that creating meanings, as with this phrase, works differently from selecting senses for utterances and that many require a mixture of the two. (MSE)

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace…

This article presents a reading-time study of scope resolution in the interpretation of ambiguous cardinality interrogatives in English-French and in English and French native sentence processing. Participants were presented with a context, a self-paced segment-by-segment presentation of a cardinality interrogative, and a numerical answer that…

Two studies investigated the processing of familiar and unfamiliar figurative language. Subjects read paragraphs containing figurative sentences (proverbs in study 1 and metaphors in study 2) or literal controls; later subjects were given a cued recall test designed to test their memory for contextually inappropriate meanings (a literal cue for a…

Examines the relationship between children's attribute saliency and metaphor interpretation. Findings indicate that attribute saliency for the individual perceiving the metaphor plays a key role in the interpretation process. (Author/CB)

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…

The present study compares the processing of unambiguous restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses (RCs) within both a null context and a supportive discourse using a self-paced reading methodology. Individuals read restrictive RCs more slowly than non-restrictive RCs in a null context, but processed restrictive RCs faster than…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Theoreticians have been asking for a long time what processes are involved in comprehension of figurative language, but psycholinguists have only recently addressed this question. One specific type of figurative expression, the metaphor, has been the focus of much recent research, in part because it promises to contribute much to the understanding…

Vague language is widely used in both spoken and written English and it is also a very important language variable. The process of language use is active, during which speakers and hearers constantly have to make choices out of variables. This paper mainly studies the influences of vagueness in language on second language learning and attaches…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

This paper reports on an investigation of children's (aged 3;5-9;8) comprehension of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Results from a picture selection study (N=90) showed that children use verb semantics and preposition type to resolve the ambiguity, with older children also showing sensitivity to the…