Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words. Unbalanced homonymous ("pen"), balanced homonymous ("panel"), metaphorically polysemous ("lip"), and metonymically polysemous words ("rabbit") were used in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task. The theoretical distinction between homonymy an...

We assume that the brain is some kind of a computer and look at operations implied by the figurative use of language. Figurative language is pervasive, bypasses the literal meaning of what is said and is interpreted metaphorically or by analogy. Such an interpretation calls for a mapping in concept space, leading us to speculate about the nature of concept space in terms of readily computable m...

Since Aristotle, people have believed that metaphors and similes express the same type of figurative meaning, despite the fact that they are expressed with different sentence patterns. In contrast, recent psycholinguistic models have suggested that metaphors and similes may promote different comprehension processes. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates involved in the comprehens...

From the analysis of naturally occurring texts we obtained evidence for the systematic interaction between nominal anaphora and metonymies. This leads us to postulate an integrated model incorporating both phenomena simultaneously. The consideration of discourse constraints for metonymy resolution allows us to challenge the commonly held view that the interpretation of metonymies should proceed...

A metonym is a word with a figurative meaning, similar to a metaphor. Because metonyms are closely related to metaphors, we apply features that are used successfully for metaphor recognition to the task of detecting metonyms. On the ACL SemEval 2007 Task 8 data with gold standard metonym annotations, our system achieved 86.45% accuracy on the location metonyms. Our code can be found on GitHub.

Some researches indicate that the right hemisphere (RH) has a unique role in comprehending the figurative meaning of metaphors whereas the results of other studies do not support the notion of a selective role for the RH in accessing metaphorical meanings. The present research used fMRI technology to test a theoretical explanation of the above conflicting findings. This theoretical account is d...

Giora's [Giora, R., 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the Graded Salience Hypothesis. Cogn. Linguist. 7 (1), 183-206; Giora, R., 2003. On Our Mind: Salience Context and Figurative Language. Oxford Univ. Press, New York] Graded Salience Hypothesis states that more salient meanings-coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity, or prototypic...

Two experiments compared 7- and 8-year-olds' and 9- and 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 with that of adults (Experiment 1) and 11- and 12...