A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. "'The seagull' took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the 'thief'"). The reference from "the thief" back to "the seagull" is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments…

Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing…

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…

Reading is a fascinating cognitive process through which individuals perceive arbitrary symbols on a page and turn them into vivid mental representations of text. Most available evidence supports an embodied explanation for how readers are capable of such representations--they recruit supralinguistic brain regions in order to mentally simulate the…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

This paper explores the processes underlying verb metaphoric extension. Work on metaphor processing has largely focused on noun metaphor, despite evidence that verb metaphor is more common. Across three experiments, we collected paraphrases of simple intransitive sentences varying in semantic strain--for example, "The motor complained"…

Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

The purpose of this paper was to demonstrate how H G Wells' novella, The Time Machine examined the contemporary social, cultural, and political environment via a posthumanist perspective of far future. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study emphasized on critical and analytical techniques in the novella. The study was carried out with…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect…

Lexical inferencing is considered a listening strategy that is commonly employed by advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listeners and a factor that contributes to successful listening comprehension. However, investigations of the factors that influence inferencing success in listening as well as how much each factor contributes to success…