This article addresses how to enhance metaphor and metonymy comprehension in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD), who are known to have difficulties with figurative language. After considering some major issues on typical development and in HF-ASD, and some studies on treatment in this specific domain, the authors describe an intervention methodology that can be use...

We assume that the brain is some kind of a computer and look at operations implied by the figurative use of language. Figurative language is pervasive, bypasses the literal meaning of what is said and is interpreted metaphorically or by analogy. Such an interpretation calls for a mapping in concept space, leading us to speculate about the nature of concept space in terms of readily computable m...

Giora's [Giora, R., 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the Graded Salience Hypothesis. Cogn. Linguist. 7 (1), 183-206; Giora, R., 2003. On Our Mind: Salience Context and Figurative Language. Oxford Univ. Press, New York] Graded Salience Hypothesis states that more salient meanings-coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity, or prototypic...

Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have ...

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.g., college) wh...

in recent decades, “figurative language” has gained the interest of a large number of russian linguists as a source of lexical enrichment. persian and russian manifest, are more or less, a different image of a movement. nevertheless, these verbs share a number of linguistic features, although they belong to two diverse languages. due to the high frequency in the function of movement verbs in th...

Do listeners process literal and figurative speech differently? Research testing interpretation times has resulted in mixed findings. Some researchers have found that figurative language is processed more slowly than literal language (e.g. Noveck et.al 2001) whereas others have not (e.g. Glucksberg 2003, Gibbs & Tendahl 2006). This may be due to limitations of standard reaction time methodology...

Face-to-face dialogue is the basic site of language use. Our group’s program of research focuses on unique features of face-to-face dialogue, especially the ways in which participants collaborate moment-by-moment (e.g. Bavelas et al., 1995; Bavelas and Chovil, 1997; Bavelas et al., 2000, 2002). Current experiments are showing that the availability of collaborative processes in dialogue signific...

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...