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…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

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…

In this article, the author compares the functions of a graduate adult education program and a greenhouse. A graduate adult education program is a place where, like in a greenhouse, exciting new hybrids can be developed--working with people outside the school of education, in different disciplines and beyond the university's walls, sharing what…

This article takes the "public intellectual" trope as a theoretical case study, and traces how it has been used in the elite public sphere of the contemporary United States since its coining in 1987. The analysis challenges the notion that the "public intellectual" is primarily about broad democratic publics. It documents instead how the trope is…

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…