Four doctoral students and their professor contemplate the value of play in their high school and college classrooms. They discuss their experiences teaching children's books, student illustrations, and excerpts from magazines and newspapers that convey the intricacies of the English language through homonyms, homophones, homographs, and polysemy.…

In two experiments, we tested for lingering effects of "verb replacement" disfluencies on the processing of garden path sentences that exhibit the main verb/reduced relative (MV/RR) ambiguity. Participants heard sentences with revisions like "The little girl chosen, uh, selected for the role celebrated with her parents and friends". We found that…

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

Examines whether young children and adults are able to interpret sarcastic utterances and whether placements of contextual information before or after the utterance differentially affect interpretation. Results obtained from first and third graders and from college students indicated that different placements of contextual information do affect…

A proverb explanation task consisting of 24 low-familiarity expressions was administered to 353 individuals (ages 13-79) to examine how patterns of language growth in adults compared to those observed in adolescents. Results indicate performance improved markedly during adolescence and into early adulthood, and then began to decline during the…

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

A self-paced reading experiment investigated processing of sentences containing a noun-phrase that could temporarily be mistaken as the direct-object argument of a verb in a subordinate clause but actually constituted the syntactic subject of the main clause (often referred to as an "early" vs. "late closure" ambiguity). Subcategorization…

The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…

Recent research indicates that individuals with nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions can experience difficulties processing lexical ambiguities in a variety of contexts. This study examined how prior processing of a lexical ambiguity influences subsequent meaning activation in 10 individuals with NS lesions and 10 matched healthy controls.…

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…

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)

Looks at research and practice in the area of idioms and offers suggestions for teaching them effectively. (FL)

Reviews theory and research on the use and effectiveness of metaphors, analogies, and models as instructional tools. Concludes that the use of metaphors and other figurative devices promotes the acquisition of new knowledge. Suggests possible design and use of instructional metaphors. (FMW)

A study was conducted to examine some of the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence metaphor comprehension in young children. Presupposing that (1) the similarities between the topic and the vehicle in a metaphor comprise the metaphor's ground, (2) salience is the degree of prominence of a characteristic in relation to a concept, and (3)…