This paper discusses the figurative meanings attached to the names of different animals in different cultures, and highlights some of the problems language learners and translators face when dealing with single-word conventional metaphor. (15 references) (JL)

Discusses the importance of world knowledge in the comprehension of metaphor. Examines difficulties encountered by students when their cultural schemata are insufficient or inappropriate to ensure comprehension. Offers pedagogical solutions to these problems. (DMM)

Subjects were 30 participants at each of 4 ages: 5, 7, and 10 years, and adult. Subjects described objects ordered in pairs. Children of 5 and 7 years improved their ability to understand visual metaphors which display a topic-visual interaction. From age 5 to adulthood, subjects improved their ability to comprehend metaphoric similarity. (RH)

Outlines five competing ideas about how the literal meanings of sentences can be determined. Studies people's intuitive sense of the literal meanings of sentences. Examines through two experiments people's judgments about the literality of sentences containing figurative language. Discusses implications of findings. (HB)

A study explored the role of analogy in enhancing the ability of 63 gifted children (ages 5-6) to paraphrase metaphors. Children who were instructed in analogies solved more analogies and offered more parallel explanations than those who did not have analogy instruction. They also correctly interpreted more metaphors. (Author/CR)

This paper speaks from a poetic voice and briefly discusses the untamed nature of metaphor and narrative. Then the story is shared. The tale relates to how healing of identity, after eons of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of social isolation and internalised sorrow, requires deep abiding patience. Situated in transpersonal or spiritual…

When physical education teachers provide skill cues, they do so with the intention of focusing children's attention on a particular aspect of the motor skill to be performed. Rarely do physical education teachers notice if their cue was provided to the student in figurative or literal language. This article explains the types of figurative…

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…

In this article the author uses Levi-Strauss' (1966) metaphor of Bricolage to examine how teachers, not policymakers, make sense of their "problems of practice" in three United States high schools. The article also examines how teachers address these problems of practice. It concludes by underscoring the disconnect between teachers' and…

This article is a follow up to an earlier publication that developed the rationale for using conversation as a metaphor to teach research writing. We presented this proposed teaching approach at several conferences, including WILU in May 2005 at Guelph, Canada. The discussions with participants in these presentations validated the tenets of the…

The aim of this study was to examine a form of sarcasm that has hardly been considered to date, sarcastic requests, at an earlier period of development than addressed in past developmental research. This article looked specifically at the role of intonation and context in sarcastic-request understanding by native French-speaking children ages 3 to…

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],'…

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of…

Teaching computer applications can be a very tedious and time-consuming task. The purpose of this article is to present a systematic approach to help guide teachers in teaching computer applications. The metaphor used in developing and organizing instructional content is a jigsaw puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle consists of small pieces that fit together…

Teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates can be difficult under the best of circumstances. The densely figurative language can be very difficult to sift through for students unfamiliar with anything but naturalistic speech. When this is further compounded by the students' resistance to reading anything longer than several paragraphs, teachers find…