The fictional world imaginatively constituted during literary reading is sometimes compared with the imaginal world created during dreaming. At the core of both reading and dreaming may be the type of attentional adjustment that occurs when departures from expected events emerge in experience. During dreaming, markers of this attentional adjustment – and of the related transformations of dream ...

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric (Some surgeons are butchers), literal (Some surgeons are fathers), or non-meaningful sentences (Some surgeons are shelves) and had to decide whether ...

Metaphoric competence is an essential part of language concept fluency and communicative competence.Since metaphor is pervasive in language, when Chinese second language (L2) learners are engaged in reading process, one of the barriers to influence their comprehension is metaphor. This paper aims to empirically investigate the relationship between the receptive metaphoric competence and reading...

Background: An underestimated feature of schizophrenia is the impaired processing of the metaphoric speech, mainly due to a reduced activation of the right hemisphere. Objective/hypothesis: We investigated whether anodal tDCS over the right posterior superior temporal sulcus may improve the processing of metaphoric speech of schizophrenia patients (SCZ). Methods: Ten SCZ subjects were randomly ...

This study examines the processing of metaphoric reference by bilingual speakers. English dominant, Spanish dominant, and balanced bilinguals read passages in English biasing either a figurative (e.g., describing a weak and soft fighter that always lost and everyone hated) or a literal (e.g., describing a donut and bakery shop that made delicious pastries) meaning of a critical metaphoric refer...

Due to inconsistent findings, the role of the two cerebral hemispheres in processing metaphoric language is controversial. The present study examined the possibility that these inconsistent findings may be due, at least partly, to differences in the type (i.e., words vs sentences) or the familiarity of the linguistic material. Previous research has shown that novel two-word metaphoric expressio...