Search Results (12)

This study investigates the semantic development of V-diao in Taiwan Mandarin-speaking children, focusing on how they acquire both literal and non-literal meanings. Three key factors influencing this acquisition—type, metaphoricality, and context—were examined. This study recruited sixty elementary school children, divided into three age groups (7, 9, and 11 years old), along with twenty graduate students serving as an adult control group. Two truth value judgment tasks were employed: the Word-in-Sentences (WISE) task, which presents sentences containing the V-diao construction, and the Word-in-Scenarios (WISC) task, which uses stories and pictures as additional aids. The results indicated that V-diao₁ was the easiest for children to comprehend, followed by V-diao₂, while V-diao₃ and V-diao₄ were more challenging. Literal meanings of V-diao were found to be easier to acquire than non-literal ones, highlighting the metaphorical effect. Additionally, participants performed better on the WISE task than the WISC task, suggesting that contextual aids like stories and pictures did not enhance performance. These findings provide insights into the semantic development of Mandarin-speaking children and the role of metaphorical and contextual factors in language acquisition. Full article

Reading comprehension in Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese) presents unique challenges due to the language’s logographic writing system. Analysis of oral reading miscues reveals specific patterns in L2 learners’ reading processes and comprehension difficulties. Despite established theoretical frameworks for miscue analysis in alphabetic languages, empirical research on miscues in logographic systems such as Chinese remains limited, particularly regarding their relationship with reading comprehension. This study investigates the relationship between oral reading miscues and literal comprehension of Chinese texts among L2 Chinese learners. Sixty-six intermediate-level Chinese learners from U.S. universities participated in the study. Oral reading and sentence-level translation tasks were administered to examine miscues and assess comprehension. Through analyzing the oral reading data, we identified 14 types of oral reading miscues, and they were categorized into four categories: orthographic, syntactic, semantic, and word processing miscues. Results showed strong negative correlations between oral reading miscues and comprehension. Orthographic, syntactic, and semantic miscues were negatively correlated with reading comprehension performance, while word processing miscues showed no significant correlation with comprehension. The findings reveal the complex relationship between character recognition, word processing behaviors, and comprehension in L2 Chinese reading, and suggest a need for a nuanced approach to oral reading error correction in L2 Chinese reading instruction. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications for effective reading instruction and reading assessment in L2 Chinese classrooms are discussed. Full article

Background. The left and right temporoparietal junctions (TPJs) are two brain areas involved in several brain networks, largely studied for their diverse roles, from attentional orientation to theory of mind and, recently, predictive processing. In predictive processing, one crucial concept is prior precision, that is, the reliability of the predictions of incoming stimuli. This has been linked with modulations of alpha power as measured with electrophysiological techniques, but TPJs have seldom been studied in this framework. Methods. The present article investigates, using magnetoencephalography, whether spontaneous oscillations in pre-stimulus alpha power in the left and right TPJs can modulate brain responses during a linguistic task that requires predictive processing in literal and non-literal sentences. Results. Overall, results show that pre-stimulus alpha power in the rTPJ was associated with post-stimulus responses only in the left superior temporal gyrus, while lTPJ pre-stimulus alpha power was associated with post-stimulus activity in Broca’s area, left middle temporal gyrus, and left superior temporal gyrus. Conclusions. We conclude that both the right and left TPJs have a role in linguistic prediction, involving a network of core language regions, with differences across brain areas and linguistic conditions that can be parsimoniously explained in the context of predictive processing. Full article

This paper examines the relevance of the sentence concept to the understanding of three types of implicitness (presupposition, conversational implicatures, irony). Our experimental protocol involved 105 children (aged 6 to 11) and 82 adults who were asked to read short texts composed of a context about some characters and a target sentence conveying one of the three implicit contents. After reading, children and adults had to answer a comprehension yes-no question and indicate the segments from the text that helped them answer the question. Results showed a difference between the three types of implicitness, with presupposition being detected and understood at a subsentential level, whereas implicatures and irony come under extrasentential level requiring the context to be taken into account. Referring to sentence as a unit of meaning does not seem relevant as soon as understanding is not limited to the literal meaning of what is written, but also concerns what is meant by the text. Full article

This study aimed to examine the gestural embodiment of intensifiers in iconic and metaphoric gestures when these words are used with literal and metaphoric statements. We asked a group of Persian native speakers to listen to and then retell a set of Persian stories. In these stories, a number of intensifiers were used with literal and metaphoric sentences. The results showed that when an intensifier was used with a literal sentence, there was a higher probability of using an iconic or beat gesture than when there was no intensifier in the sentence. Also, when an intensifier was used with a metaphoric sentence, there was a higher probability of using a metaphoric or beat gesture than when the sentence contained no intensifier. These results suggested that an intensifier in a literal or metaphoric sentence can strengthen the mental simulation and the embodiment of objects, ideas, or situations. When an intensifier is used with a literal or metaphoric sentence, the strength of activation in the premotor areas may be amplified and spread to motor areas. In contrast, when no such intensifier is used in a literal or metaphoric sentence, there is a higher probability of simulation in premotor areas without spreading to the primary motor areas. The production of an internal force and expressing emphasis are two other possibilities that may explain the higher use of gestures with intensifiers. Full article

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of manner adverbs on the gestural embodiment of actions that are described by literal and metaphoric sentences. We asked a group of participants to read and then orally retell four stories. Each story had two versions. In one version, literal and metaphoric sentences describing literal and metaphorical actions did not include manner adverbs. In the other version of each story, the same sentences included a manner adverb that provided more information about literal or metaphoric actions. Participants’ reproductions of stories were recorded with a camera and were analyzed to make a comparison between gestures that accompanied sentences that included a manner adverb and sentences that did not include a manner adverb. The results showed that when literal and metaphoric sentences included a manner adverb, there was a higher probability of using a gesture than when these sentences were used without a manner adverb. In other words, using a manner adverb increases the probability of using a gesture with literal and metaphorical sentences. Therefore, it is suggested that adding a manner adverb to a literal or metaphoric sentence can strengthen the process of embodiment of the action described in that sentence. We present two explanations for this observation. Full article

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon indicating a difference between literal meanings and implied intentions. It is commonly used on blogs, e-commerce platforms, and social media. Numerous NLP tasks, such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis systems, are hampered by its linguistic nature in detection. Traditional techniques concentrated mostly on textual incongruity. Recent research demonstrated that the addition of commonsense knowledge into sarcasm detection is an effective new method. However, existing techniques cannot effectively capture sentence “incongruity” information or take good advantage of external knowledge, resulting in imperfect detection performance. In this work, new modules are proposed for maximizing the utilization of the text, the commonsense knowledge, and their interplay. At first, we propose an adaptive incongruity extraction module to compute the distance between each word in the text and commonsense knowledge. Two adaptive incongruity extraction modules are applied to text and commonsense knowledge, respectively, which can obtain two adaptive incongruity attention matrixes. Therefore, each of the words in the sequence receives a new representation with enhanced incongruity semantics. Secondly, we propose the incongruity cross-attention module to extract the incongruity between the text and the corresponding commonsense knowledge, thereby allowing us to pick useful commonsense knowledge in sarcasm detection. In addition, we propose an improved gate module as a feature fusion module of text and commonsense knowledge, which determines how much information should be considered. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in achieving state-of-the-art performance on three datasets as well as enjoying improved interpretability. Full article

It is controversial whether sarcasm processing should go through literal meaning processing. There is also a lack of eye movement evidence for Chinese sarcasm processing. In this study, we used eye movement experiments to explore the processing differences between sarcastic and literal meaning in Chinese text and whether this was regulated by sentence complexity. We manipulated the variables of complexity and literality. We recorded 33 participants’ eye movements when they were reading Chinese text and the results were analyzed by a linear mixed model. We found that, in the early stage of processing, there was no difference between the processing time of the sarcastic meaning and the literal meaning of simple remarks, whereas for complex remarks, the time needed to process the sarcastic meaning was longer than that needed to process the literal meaning. In the later stage of processing, regardless of complexity, the processing time of the sarcastic meaning was longer than that of the literal meaning. These results suggest that sarcastic speech processing in Chinese is influenced by literal meaning, and the effect of literal meaning on sarcastic remarks is regulated by complexity. Sarcastic meaning was expressed differently in different stages of processing. These results support the hierarchical salience hypothesis of the serial modular model. Full article

Idioms (e.g., break the ice, spill the beans) are ubiquitous multiword units that are often semantically non-compositional. Psycholinguistic data suggests that L1 readers process idioms in a hybrid fashion, with early comprehension facilitated by direct retrieval, and later comprehension inhibited by factors promoting compositional parsing (e.g., semantic decomposability). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the role of direct retrieval and compositional analysis when idioms are read naturally in sentences in an L2. Thus, French–English bilingual adults with French as their L1 were tested using English sentences. For idioms in canonical form, Experiment 1 showed that prospective verb-related decomposability and retrospective noun-related decomposability guided L2 readers towards bottom-up figurative meaning access over different time courses. Direct retrieval played a lesser role, and was mediated by the availability of a congruent “cognate” idiom in the readers’ L1. Next, Experiment 2 included idioms where direct retrieval was disrupted by a phrase-final language switch into French (e.g., break the glace, spill the fèves). Switched idioms were read comparably to switched literal phrases at early stages, but were penalized at later stages. These results collectively suggest that L2 idiom processing is mostly compositional, with direct retrieval playing a lesser role in figurative meaning comprehension. Full article

Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age years, with literacy. We examined adjectival passives (La comida estaba servida, “Dinner was served”) with the copula estar in the imperfect, which refer to a description of a state or a final result; and verbal passives with the copula ser in the imperfect (La comida era servida. “Dinner was being served”), which refer to an ongoing or habitual action in the past. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) testing knowledge of the copulas in different simple sentences and a picture-matching task (PMT) testing the comprehension of the two passive clauses revealed that HL learners’ knowledge of the copulas resembles that of literate monolingually raised native speakers more than that of L2 learners. HL learners are able to integrate their knowledge of the copulas to comprehend syntactically complex clauses, especially in the aural modality. Full article

This study investigates the way Greek EFL elementary students conceptualize English phrasal verbs of the form component verb (take) plus component particle (up, down, in, out, back, off, on, apart). It is suggested image schemas play a facilitatory role in the conceptualization and interpretation of the figurative meanings of English phrasal verbs. The study argues that within the phrasal verb construct, the component particle prompts for the extension from literal to figurative meanings since the particle designates image schematic experiences (bodily-kinesthetic). The study conducted two types of test: (1) meaning of the sentence and (2) image-matching from the sentence. In test 1, participants were asked to read sentences which contained the verb take plus particles and they had to select the most appropriate meaning of the phrasal verb that matched the overall meaning of the sentence. In test 2, participants were asked to read sentences wherein phrasal verbs of the form take plus particles were highlighted. They were asked to match the meaning of the phrasal verb with one image. Each image represented a different type of image schema such as container, front-back orientation and proximity-distance. Full article

We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., “door”) while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e., the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e., “door”) was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of languagemediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates. Full article