There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999; Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004; Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003; Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004; Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002).…

Through recording the streaming x- and y-coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in…

Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for…

In this paper, two beginning qualitative researchers describe the challenges and successes of conducting a collaborative self-study. For two academic years, the authors wrote and analyzed personal narratives related to their experiences as a lesbian and a gay man, respectively, in educational contexts. This article addresses the data analysis…

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century's lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing.…

Bodily manipulations, such as juggling, suggest a well-synchronized physical interaction as if the person were a physics expert. The juggler uses "knowledge" that is rooted in bodily experience, to interact with the environment. Such enacted bodily knowledge is powerful, efficient, predictive, and relates to sensory perception of the dynamics of…

This qualitative case study investigated the impact of Workforce Investment Act (WIA) funding on the providers and planners of programs for incumbent workers in one Midwest WIA region. It examines the collaboration and power conflicts that are part of planning and implementing this legislation for the stakeholders. The study applied Matland's…

This study was designed to determine the contributions of metalinguistic skill and psycholinguistic processing ability to children's ability to detect the ambiguity of sentences and the relationship among all three factors to early reading ability. A total of 20 first graders and 20 second graders were given tasks testing the following abilities:…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

Many philosophers of education emphasise the impossibility to really "solve" philosophical--and with that, educational--problems these days. Philosophers have been trying to give philosophy a new, constructive turn in the face of this insolvability. This paper focuses on irony-based approaches that try to exploit the very uncertainty of…

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated the ability of high- and low-span comprehenders to construe subtle shades of meaning through perceptual representation. High- and low-span comprehenders responded to pictures that either matched or mismatched a target object's shape as implied by the preceding sentence context. At 750 ms after hearing the…

This paper discusses particular uses of language in a specific social location in the Philippines drawn from the 15-volume ethnographic study of functional literacy in 14 marginal communities in the Philippines by Doronila (e.g. 1996). These are uses of language by people whose internal capacity to generate change is strong yet many of whom are…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

The metaphorical basis of teacher reflection about teaching and learning has been a rich area of theory and research. This is a study of metaphor as a shared system of interpretation and classification, which teachers and student teachers and their supervising teachers can cooperatively explore. This study employs metaphor as a means of research…

Slavery in the pre-Civil War United States is a hard topic to teach, not only because it raises issues of racism and injustice, but also because students assume so much. Often, they think all northerners were abolitionists or "good guys" and southerners were "bad guys" who enslaved African Americans because they viewed them as inferior. England,…