The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony, the emergence of nonliteral similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing children between 4 and 12 years of age, 19 typ...

In studies of the cognitive processing of idioms, the role of mental imagery in understanding idioms remains a controversial issue. Cacciari and Glucksberg (1995) conducted an experimental study to investigate whether generating mental images of idioms can facilitate their comprehension. Their results appeared to reject both the possible connection between the literal mental image of an idiom a...

Fictive Motion is a type of figurative language used to express static visual scenes in terms of motion, for example, ”The road runs along the river” or ”The scar runs down his back”. Previous research suggests that we mentally simulate fictive motion (Matlock 2004, Matlock & Bergmann, in press), but little is known about the use of fictive motion in real discourse. Our study is the first to lo...

The aim of the present paper is to provide an insight into the issue of idiom comprehension in patients who are in the process of recovery from the syndrome of aphasia. Research in figurative language comprehension has seen a robust development in the recent decades. However, it has not been until quite recently that psycholinguists began to delve into the aspect of metaphorical language compre...

the present study is a randomized pilot project that intends to test the graded salience hypothesis (giora, 1997), to investigate the major factors contributing to understanding meaning. according to graded salience hypothesis, more salient meanings–coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity, or prototypicality–are accessed faster than and reach sufficien...