The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two strategies of explicit teaching of economic terms on learners' vocabulary learning and retention. In the first explicit strategy, known as 'etymological elaboration', the focus was on presenting conceptual metaphors through 'identify-the-source' tasks, that is, providing the learners with the source domains underlying the metaphors,...

Idiom comprehension of 15 patients with mild probable Alzheimer's disease was examined by means of a sentence-to-picture matching task. Patients had to choose between two pictures, one representing the figurative and the other the literal interpretation. They were also submitted to a literal sentence comprehension test and to a pencil-and-paper dual task. Whereas literal comprehension was norma...

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. T...

Psycholinguistic repercussions of early experience in informal translation (language brokering) were examined in two tasks administered to proficient Spanish-English bilingual adults who had extensive brokering experience during childhood and proficient bilinguals without prior brokering experience. It was hypothesized that experience in language brokering leads to a greater sensitivity to non-...

Contrary to a certain traditional conception dating back at least to Locke, everyday linguistic communication is not a simple matter of putting one's thoughts into words for one's audience to put back into thoughts. This naive " code model " misses the fact that what a speaker means in uttering a sentence can be distinct in various ways from what the sentence means. She might not mean what she ...

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed o...

charity (zakat) has different meanings; one is the literal meaning and the other is the religious one. his excellency ali (peace be upon him) paid his charity (zakat) while praying when he hears a poor man's words asking for help; he donated his signet. different poets have poems about this event.

the coalition between terms and their meaning can be as the result of phonological repetition in its speech structure and specific semantic load. this can lead to meaning distinction in choosing words and also meaning association. therefore, literally and syntactically, the phonological level cannot be separated from semantic level. earlier, the phonological association in text has been discuss...

Suppose you ask a colleague how a class he just taught went, and he replies that "It was a great class the students were glued to their seats." There are two clearly distinct interpretations of this utterance, which might usefully be categorized as a literal and a figurative one. Which interpretation you believe is appropriate will determine your course of action; whether you congratulate your ...

The present study examined the role of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in processing alternative meanings of idiomatic sentences. We conducted two experiments using ambiguous idioms with plausible literal interpretations as stimuli. In the first experiment we tested hemispheric differences in accessing either the literal or the idiomatic meaning of idioms for targets presented...