The metaphor of "monoculture on the intellectual landscape" is used to analyse the effects of large-scale research management regimes. The metaphor of "monoculture on the intellectual landscape", derived from Shiva's "monocultures of the mind", is developed and illustrated with respect to gender and ethnicity. The…

The interactional feature of hypermedia that allows high-level student-control is considered as one of the most important advantages that hypermedia provides for learning and teaching. However, high-level student control in hypermedia might not always lead to high-level learning performance. The learner is likely to experience navigation problems…

This tropological analysis of "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's "dialectical" irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the…

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a…

This article looks at how "The Simpsons'" representations of aging, considered ageist and stereotypical by some, can be viewed as a positive look at the elderly that attempts to subvert the same stereotypes that it seemingly employs. The Baby Boom cohort is now seen as an attractive economic group, and as they continue their journey through the…

The purpose of this study was to expand the current literature on word definitions by focusing on definitions of idioms provided by several age groups. Preadolescents, young adolescents, older adolescents, and adults wrote definitions for 10 frequently used idioms and also rated their familiarity with the idiomatic expressions. Participants'…

It has been proposed that causal power (defined as the probability with which a candidate cause would produce an effect in the absence of any other background causes) can be intuitively computed from cause-effect covariation information. Estimation of power is assumed to require a special type of counterfactual probe question, worded to remove…

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured…

This research presents an empirical study on metaphor based on numerous interviews with parents of young children. Contemporary metaphor theory is complemented by a well-articulated place for culture and the role metaphor plays in cultural understanding. I demonstrate that 1) parents understand learning to read as the acquisition of reading…

This paper is based on the assumption that action research always affects the micropolitical balance characteristic of a certain school setting. The authors claim that micropolitics, that is the patterns of formal power and informal influence, has largely been neglected in the literature on action research in schools. This means that action…

This analysis concentrates on the case of a child, Jenny. The paper suggests that the concept of liminality may hold the key to an understanding of muted subject positions like the one assumed by Jenny in a school class. Liminality is proposed as a way of conceptualizing transitions where the subject in question transgresses established rules and…

This article aims to clarify and discuss the reasons and limits of three rather popular metaphors that are used to speak of today's complex social and cultural fabric, through references to cultural anthropology, biology and genetics. In her analysis, the author considers not only the linguistic and semantic dimension of each metaphor, but also…

In two experiments, we examined young children's ability to delay a response to ambiguous input. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds performed as poorly when they needed to choose between basing an interpretation on ambiguous input and delaying an interpretation as when making explicit evaluations of knowledge, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds found the…

The present study examined the manner in which both hemispheres utilize prior semantic context and relative meaning frequency during the processing of homographs. Participants read sentences biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meaning of their final homograph, or unbiased neutral sentences, and performed a lexical decision task on…

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among environmental influences, changes in domain specific knowledge, and changes in tolerance of ambiguity as well as changes in creativity of individuals majoring in fashion design at four-year universities. This study was based on the confluence theoretical approach which holds that…