Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, noncompositional, context-dep...

religious scientists opinion about the numbers meaning in quran is different. some of them including shahab-o-ddin ebne edris reject that the numbers shall go out of their main original meaning and shall be applied in their virtual meaning and some others agree that some numbers like seven, seventy, and thousands are indicative of figurative meanings and say about them: the meaning of these num...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...

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 ...

The time courses for constructing literal and figurative interpretations of simple propositions were measured with the response signal, speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure. No differences were found in comprehension speed for literal and figurative strings in a task that required judging whether a string of words was meaningful. Likewise, no differences were found in processing speed for nonsense...

processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 2 Abstract Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared ...

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 mani...

Do listeners process literal and figurative speech differently? Research testing interpretation times has resulted in mixed findings. Some researchers have found that figurative language is processed more slowly than literal language (e.g. Noveck et.al 2001) whereas others have not (e.g. Glucksberg 2003, Gibbs & Tendahl 2006). This may be due to limitations of standard reaction time methodology...

The present study examines non-native (L2) and native (L1) listeners' access to figurative idiomatic meaning and literal constituent meaning in two cross-modal priming experiments. Proficient German learners of English (L2) and native speakers of American English (L1) responded to English target words preceded by English idioms embedded in non-biasing prime sentences in a lexical decision task....