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...

To comprehend figurative utterances such as metaphor or sarcasm, a listener must both judge the literal meaning of the statement and infer the speaker's intended meaning (mentalizing; Amodio and Frith, 2006). To delineate the neural substrates of pragmatic comprehension, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 20 normal adult volunteers. Participants read short stories fo...

In a previous study, we demonstrated that listeners were highly successful in identifying the intended meaning of spoken ditropic sentences (those which may carry either a literal or an idiomatic meaning) when speakers were instructed to convey the distinction. The present communication reports on acoustic and phonetic analyses carried out with the goal of identifying cues that distinguished th...

Studies in developmental literature claim that for young children context plays a more important role than literal meaning in comprehending a speaker's communicative intention. The present study evaluates this claim for different categories of context in children aged 3 to 7 years. In particular, we analyze contexts pertaining to the categories we define as follows: Access, Space, Time, Discour...

the dispute over form and meaning has a long history among translators and translation researchers, some believing the form to be of higher priority and hence choosing the literal method and others cherishing meaning and accordingly opting for free translation. the present study seeks to survey the preference of the readers for these styles so as to analyze the efficiency of each method. two tr...