The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

Current education standards in the U.S. require school students to read and understand complex texts from different subject areas (e.g., social studies). However, such texts usually contain figurative language, complex phrases and sentences, as well as unfamiliar discourse relations. This may present an obstacle to students whose native language is not English — a growing sub-population in the ...

The time courses for constructing literal and figurative interpretations of simple propositions were measured with the response signal, speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure. No differences were found in comprehension speed for literal and figurative strings in a task that required judging whether a string of words was meaningful. Likewise, no differences were found in processing speed for nonsense...

Abstract Multiword units have experienced renewed interest in recent research due to their prominent role usage-based approaches general linguistics, as well work on bilingualism and second language acquisition. While the last few decades focused figurative multiword (i.e., idioms), a growing number of studies more recently non-figurative (collocations particular, but also binomials or lexical ...

Optimally, a translated text should preserve information while maintaining the writing style of the original. When this is not possible, as is often the case with figurative speech, a common practice is to simplify and make explicit the implications. However, in our investigations of translations from English to another language, English-to-Chinese texts were often found to include idiomatic ex...

Although the neurocognitive processes underlying the comprehension of figurative language, especially metaphors and idioms, have been studied extensively, less is known about the processing of irony. In two experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the types of cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of ironic and literal sentences and their relative time co...

I. ABSTRACT This is a fifth grade Language Arts unit on poetry covering the Core Knowledge Sequence Language Arts strand. The unit begins with a review on poetry from fourth grade. Students should have a feel for poetry from the pleasure of reading it. They should have the understanding of the elements of rhyme, rhythm, line, and stanza. This unit is a more in depth study into poetry that cover...