Though metaphoric language comprehension has previously been investigated with event-related potentials, little attention has been devoted to extending this research from the monolingual to the bilingual context. In the current study, late proficient unbalanced Polish (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals performed a semantic decision task to novel metaphoric, conventional metaphoric, literal, and anoma...

The primary goal of the current study was to examine the ability of children with autism (ASD) and children with learning disabilities (LD) to improve their metaphoric competence by an intervention program using "thinking maps". Twenty ASD children, 20 LD, and 20 typically developed (TD) children were tested on metaphors and idioms comprehension tests, homophone meaning generation test, and flu...

BACKGROUND All languages use metaphoric expressions; some deliberately chosen, some (for example, 'digesting information') not usually perceived as metaphoric. Increasingly, it is suggested metaphoric expressions constrain the way we conceptualise the world, as well as being a means of achieving stylistic effect. AIM To study metaphoric expressions used by doctors and patients in general prac...

According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, people understand abstract concepts depending on the activation of more concrete concepts, but not vice versa. The present research aims to investigate the role of directionality and automaticity regarding the activation of the conceptual metaphor "good is up". Experiment 1 tested the automaticity of the spatial-to-valence metaphoric congruency effec...

Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a metaphoric or a literal target reading. As had been found by Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos (1978), metaphoric targets were comprehended about as quickly as literals when context was long, but more slowly than literals when context was short. The latter result may have been due to the failure o...

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 ...

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 ...