"Ditropically" ambiguous sentences (each having both a literal and an idiomatic interpretation) were prepared tbr listener's discrimination judgments, and fbr silent readers' rankings on an "idiomaticity'" scale. Listeners were unable to discriminate the literal from the idiomatic versions when presented with randomized single sentences excised from paragraph contexts. There was a bias toward i...

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. T...

This note deals with the problem of discovering rules that govern social interactions and relations in pre-literal societies. Two older computer programs are first described which can receive data, possibly incomplete and redundant, representing kinship relations among named individuals. The programs then establish a knowledge base in the form of a directed graph, which the user can query in a ...

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...

Terror management theory asserts that death fear (fear of annihilation) is buffered by self-esteem and beliefs in literal and symbolic immortality achieved through participation in the cultural system. The aims of this study were to determine how variables suggested by the theory were related to fear of death measures. Participants were 123 Black and 265 White elders aged 60 to 100 years; they ...