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...

Idiomatic expressions can be interpreted literally or figuratively. These two meanings are often processed in parallel or very rapidly, as evidenced by online measures of idiomatic processing. Because in many cases the figurative meaning cannot be derived from the component lexical elements and because of the speed with which this meaning is accessed, it is assumed such meanings are stored in s...

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...

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 ...

This note proposes a notion of user-defined literals based on literal constructors without requiring new syntax. If combined with the separate proposal for generalized initializer lists, it becomes a generalization of the C99 notion of compound literals. Basically, a constructor defines a user-defined literal if it is inline and specifies a simple mapping of its arguments to object representati...

A pure literal is a literal in a logic formula (usually in Conjunctive Normal Form) that occurs only positively or only negatively. The Davis-Putnam Procedure [l] was developed to find one solution to a logic formula, and it contains several techniques for speeding up the typical solution time. One of these techniques is the pure literal rule: a variable that occurs only positively or only nega...

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...

Despite the impressive amount of evidence showing involvement of the sensorimotor systems in language processing, important questions remain unsolved among which the relationship between non-literal uses of language and sensorimotor activation. The literature did not yet provide a univocal answer on whether the comprehension of non-literal, abstract motion sentences engages the same neural netw...

Previous studies have suggested that formulaic and literal expressions are stored and processed according to differing characteristics, and that certain auditory–acoustic cues serve to distinguish formulaic from literal meanings. This study took these observations a step further by investigating listeners’ ability to discriminate between literal or idiomatic exemplars of ambiguous utterances an...

The simpliied pure literal algorithm solves satissability problems by c hoosing variables in a xed order and then generating subproblems for various values of the chosen variable. If some value satisses every relation that depends on the chosen variable, then only the subproblem for that preferred value is generated. Otherwise, a subproblem is generated for every value of the variable. The full...