The Symmetry Control in Tests of the Standard Pragmatic Model: The Case of Proverb Comprehension

Honeck, Richard P.; Welge, Jeffrey A.; Temple, Jon G.

doi:10.1207/s15327868ms1304_2

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…These results support the findings in Honeck, Welge & Temple [68] concerning the processing of proverbs, where participants were faster to make appropriateness judgements when the proverb was related literally to the context compared to when it was related figuratively. These authors interpret the findings as supporting a multi-stage model of proverb comprehension, with literal interpretations becoming available faster than figurative ones.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Chahboun¹,

Vulchanov²,

Saldaña³

et al. 2016

PLoS ONE

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Individuals with High functioning autism (HFA) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Our main goal was to investigate how highly verbal individuals with autism process figurative language and whether manipulation of the stimuli presentation modality had an impact on the processing. We were interested in the extent to which visual context, e.g., an image corresponding either to the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of the expression may facilitate responses to such expressions. Participants with HFA and their typically developing peers (matched on intelligence and language level) completed a cross-modal sentence-picture matching task for figurative expressions and their target figurative meaning represented in images. We expected that the individuals with autism would have difficulties in appreciating the non-literal nature of idioms and metaphors, despite intact structural language skills. Analyses of accuracy and reaction times showed clearly that the participants with autism performed at a lower level than their typically developing peers. Moreover, the modality in which the stimuli were presented was an important variable in task performance for the more transparent expressions. The individuals with autism displayed higher error rates and greater reaction latencies in the auditory modality compared to the visual stimulus presentation modality, implying more difficulty. Performance differed depending on type of expression. Participants had more difficulty understanding the culturally-based expressions, but not expressions grounded in human experience (biological idioms). This research highlights the importance of stimulus presentation modality and that this can lead to differences in figurative language comprehension between typically and atypically developing individuals. The current study also contributes to current debates on the role of structural language in figurative language comprehension in autism.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Chahboun¹,

Vulchanov²,

Saldaña³

et al. 2016

PLoS ONE

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“…More recent studies investigating other types of language have provided growing evidence that figurative expressions often tend to be more difficult to process than literal expressions. These include studies on the processing of idioms (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988), proverbs (Honeck, Welge, & Temple, 1998; Temple & Honeck, 1999), and irony (Dews & Winner, 1999; Giora, Fein, & Schwartz, 1998; Filik & Moxey, 2010; Schwoebel, Dews, Winner, & Srinivas, 2000). Even in the realm of metaphor, several recent studies using electrophysiology have suggested that the processing of metaphorical expressions is more effortful than the processing of literal expressions (Coulson & Van Petten, 2002, 2007; De Grauwe, Swain, Holcomb, Ditman, & Kuperberg, 2010; Lai, Curran, & Menn, 2009; Tartter, Gomes, Dubrovsky, Molholm, & Stewart, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s hard to offend the college: Effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing.

Lowder¹,

Gordon²

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In two eye-tracking while reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.g., college) when they were an argument of the main verb and showed that they are more difficult to process in a figurative context (e.g., offended the college) than in a literal context (e.g., photographed the college). Experiment 2 demonstrated that when they are arguments of the main verb, familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than frequency-and-length-matched nouns that refer to people (e.g., offended the leader), but that this difficulty was reduced when the metonym appeared as part of an adjunct phrase (e.g., offended the honor of the college). The results support the view that figurative-language processing is moderated by sentence structure. When the metonym was an argument of the verb, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the indirect-access model of figurative-language comprehension. In contrast, when the metonym was part of an adjunct phrase, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the direct-access model.

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“…Given these findings, the indirect-access model was challenged by a direct-access model (Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs & Gerrig, 1989; Glucksberg, 1991, 2003), according to which comprehenders use contextual information to immediately select the intended meaning of a word or expression, so that priority in processing is not necessarily given to either the literal or semantically complex interpretation. While these findings led many psycholinguists to see the indirect-access model as discredited, a number of studies investigating a variety of figurative language forms have continued to produce patterns of results that are consistent with its prediction that semantically complex expressions should take more time to process than literal expressions (e.g., Coulson & Van Petten, 2002, 2007; De Grauwe, Swain, Holcomb, Ditman, & Kuperberg, 2010; Dews & Winner, 1999; Filik & Moxey, 2010; Giora, Fein, & Schwartz, 1998; Honeck, Welge, & Temple, 1998; Lai, Curran, & Menn, 2009; Lowder & Gordon, 2012, 2013; Schwoebel, Dews, Winner, & Srinivas, 2000; Tartter, Gomes, Dubrovsky, Molholm, & Stewart, 2002; Temple & Honeck, 1999). These findings indicate that evidence about processing time does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the indirect-access model (cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

The manuscript that we finished: Structural separation reduces the cost of complement coercion.

Lowder¹,

Gordon²

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., began the memo). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the need to type-shift the entity into an event in order for the sentence to be interpretable (e.g., began writing the memo). Both experiments showed that the magnitude of the coercion cost was reduced when the verb and complement appeared in separate clauses (e.g., The memo that was begun by the secretary; What the secretary began was the memo) compared to when the constituents appeared together in the same clause. The moderating effect of sentence structure on coercion is similar to effects that have been reported for the processing of two other types of semantically complex expressions (inanimate subject-verb integration and metonymy). We propose that sentence structure influences the depth at which complex semantic relationships are computed. When the constituents that create the need for a complex semantic interpretation appear in a single clause, readers experience processing difficulty stemming from the need to detect and/or resolve the semantic mismatch. In contrast, the need to engage in additional processing is reduced when the expression is established across a clause boundary or other structure that deemphasizes the complex relationship.

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The Symmetry Control in Tests of the Standard Pragmatic Model: The Case of Proverb Comprehension

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

It’s hard to offend the college: Effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing.

The manuscript that we finished: Structural separation reduces the cost of complement coercion.

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