Conceptual distinctions amongst generics.

Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as "dogs have four legs" and "mosquitoes carry malaria") are used to talk about kinds of things.

Reasoning about other people's beliefs: bilinguals have an advantage.

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children.

Dialogue: Can two be cheaper than one?

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) argue that language processing in dialogue is in principle easier than in monologue. Although dialogue situations may provide more opportunities for facilitative priming, those priming mechanisms are also available in monologue situations. In both cases, the interactive alignment model calls strict modular accounts of language processing into serious question.

Can Florida become like the next Florida? When metaphoric comparisons fail.

Metaphors can be understood in either of two ways: via a comparison process or via a categorization process. What determines which process will be used? According to a recent variant of comparison theory, novel metaphors must be processed as comparisons; only conventional metaphors can be processed as categorizations. We argue that choice of process is determined not by conventionality, but instead by the semantic and referential properties of the metaphor itself.

The psycholinguistics of metaphor.

Can lawyers be sharks, can jobs literally be jails, and can dogs fly across lawns? Such metaphors create novel categories that enable us to characterize the topic of interest. These novel metaphorical categories are special in that they are based on outstanding exemplars of those categories, and they borrow the exemplar's name for use as the category names. Thus 'shark' can be taken as a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being.

Older adults filter irrelevant information during metaphor comprehension.

In general, older adults are less likely than younger adults to inhibit irrelevant information when reading literal text (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). Are older adults also less likely to inhibit irrelevant information during metaphor comprehension? Young (mean age 19.2 years) and older adults (mean age 73.

Feature accessibility in conceptual combination: effects of context-induced relevance.

In conceptual combinations such as peeled apples, two kinds of features are potentially accessible: phrase features and noun features. Phrase features are true only of the phrase (e.g.

Interactive property attribution in concept combination.

We address the question of how people understand attributive noun-noun compounds. Alignment-and-comparison models suggest that the similarity of the constituent concepts guides interpretation. We propose, as an alternative, an interactive property attribution model wherein the modifier and head concepts have different functions: The head provides relevant dimensions, whereas the modifier provides candidate features for attribution.

How about another piece of pie: the allusional pretense theory of discourse irony.

The allusional pretense theory claims that ironic remarks have their effects by alluding to a failed expectation. In normal conversation, this is accomplished by violating pragmatic rules of discourse, usually the maxim of sincerity. Such violations simultaneously draw a listener's attention to the failed expectation and express the speaker's attitude (normally but not necessarily negative) toward the failed expectation.

Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension.

Do conceptual analogies motivate idiom use and comprehension in discourse? For example, a story in which a person is described as fuming would be analogically consistent with an idiom such as blew her top, but inconsistent with an idiom such as bite his head off. Earlier work by Nayak and Gibbs (1990) had suggested that people use such analogical information during idiom comprehension. We replicated their findings in an idiom choice task, suggesting that people can indeed make use of such knowledge.

Motivated forgetting mediated by implicit verbal chaining: a laboratory analog of repression.

After learning an A-B paired-associates list, college students read a list of D words, several of which were consistently accompanied by unavoidable electric shock. The D words were members of implicit B-C, C-D chains, inferred from published word-association norms. In a subsequent recall test of the original A-B list, the B words that were implicitly associated with the shocked D words were forgotten significantly more often than control words.