A dominant theory of humor comprehension suggests that people understand humor by first perceiving some incongruity in an expression and then resolving it. This is called "the incongruity-resolution theory." Experimental studies have investigated the neural basis of humor comprehension, and multiple neural substrates have been proposed; however, the specific substrate for incongruity resolution...

With the development of language teaching theories and researches, people gradually realize the importance of listening among the basic foreign language skills. Thus, how to improve the efficiency of foreign language listening teaching has long been a concern of researchers and foreign language teachers. As the beginning of English study, primary English is of significant importance for the lea...

Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that rec...

In this study, we used magnetoencephalography and a mismatch paradigm to investigate speech processing in stroke patients with auditory comprehension deficits and age-matched control subjects. We probed connectivity within and between the two temporal lobes in response to phonemic (different word) and acoustic (same word) oddballs using dynamic causal modelling. We found stronger modulation of ...

The effect of accent [pronunciation of speech sounds determined by a speaker’s regional or national location] on auditory speech comprehension has been well documented, but research is lacking as to its effects on visual speech understanding. In order to address this, the present study examined the effect of regional accent variation on speechreading performance. The aim was to determine if fam...

Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality: Some claim that idiomatic meaning is the result of compositional analysis initiated at the earliest stages of comprehension, whereas others claim that compositional analysis occurs only at late stages, subsequent to direct retrieval--especially for idioms that are highly familiar. We evaluated these alternati...

Young and older adult listeners paced themselves through recorded sentences, under instructions to recall the sentence verbatim or to respond to comprehension probes. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity and speech rate. Young and older adults paused longer after major syntactic boundaries, an effect that was constant across speech rates but became more pronounced with increasing syntactic ...

This study investigated the development of novel metaphor and metonymy comprehension in both typically developing (TD) children and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Thirty-one TD children between the ages of 3;09 and 17;01 and thirty-four individuals with WS between the ages of 7;01 and 44 years old were administered a newly developed task examining novel metaphor and metonymy comprehen...

Listening was once believed to be a passive one-way comprehensive process. However, with the development of language teaching, listening comprehension is found to be an interactive process of two-way communication, during which listeners’ background knowledge play an important role. Schema theory lays theoretical foundation for this explanation. Based on this, the author designs a Schema Theory...