Comprehending envy

The authors reviewed the psychological research on envy. The authors examined definitional challenges associated with studying envy, such as the important distinction between envy proper (which contains hostile feelings) and benign envy (which is free of hostile feelings). The authors concluded that envy is reasonably defined as an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons. The authors examined questions such as why people envy, why envy contains hostile feelings, and why it has a tendency to transmute itself. Finally, the authors considered the role of envy in helping understand other research domains and discussed ways in which people cope with the emotion.     

Comprehending Complex Concepts

Recent theories of concepts have raised the issue of how people combine simple concepts (like engine and repair) to form complex concepts (like engine repair). This article approaches this issue by asking how people comprehend modified noun phrases of this sort. One explanation of how complex concepts are understood (the feature weighting model) provides a simple mechanism in which the primary feature of the modifying concept is made more salient in the modified concept. Another explanation focuses on how world knowledge directs the combination process. The two explanations are compared in their ability to account for the interpretation of various kinds of noun phrases. Two experiments are reported which evaluate the feature weighting model's predictions for adjective-noun phrases. These contrasts suggest that the combination process does require reference to world knowledge. The consequences of accepting such an account are discussed.     

Comprehending illocutionary force

According to speech act theory (Searle, 1969), utterances have both a propositional content and an illocutionary force (the speech act performed with the utterance). Four experiments were conducted to examine whether utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. Participants in all experiments first read remarks that could be characterized by a particular speech act (e.g., beg). A recognition probe reaction time procedure was used in Experiments 1 and 2; participants indicated whether a probe word had literally appeared in the last remark that they had read. Participants were significantly slower at making this judgment (and made significantly more errors) when the probe represented the speech act performed with the prior remark than when it did not. A lexical decision task was used in Experiments 3 and 4, and participants were significantly faster at verifying target words representing the speech act performed with a remark, relative to control words. Overall, the results suggest that speech act recognition may be an important component of the comprehension of conversational remarks.     

Category mistakes and figurative language

Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’ or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are highly infelicitous and thus a prominent view claims that they are meaningless. Category mistakes are also highly prevalent in figurative language. That is to say, it is very common for sentences which are used figuratively to be such that, if taken literally, they would constitute category mistakes. (Consider for example the metaphor ‘The poem is pregnant’, the metonymy ‘The White House decided to change its policy’, or a fictional use of ‘The tree was happy’.) In this paper I argue that the view that category mistakes are meaningless is inconsistent with many central and otherwise plausible theories of figurative language. Thus if the meaninglessness view is correct, the theories in question must each be rejected, and conversely, if any of the theories in question is correct, the meaninglessness view must be wrong. The debates concerning the semantics of figurative language and concerning the semantic status of category mistakes are closely connected.     

Comprehending compass directions

Two experiments investigated the processes by which compass directions are comprehended. In both experiments, the task was as follows. A compass direction (e.g., 210 deg) was visually presented. The subject drew a representation of the direction and then pressed a key. Reaction time from onset of the stimulus to the keypress was measured. The results suggested a model of direction comprehension involving two steps: first, computing the nearest cardinal direction to the target direction, and then “rotating” from the cardinal to the target direction. Rotation could be performed equally well clockwise or counterclockwise. Additionally, north-south. tended to be comprehended faster than east-west, confirming past results that have shown an advantage of up-down over left-right in discrimination tasks.     

Comprehending anaphoric metaphors

In this study we investigate the comprehension of various kinds of anaphoric metaphors in context. We describe an experiment that manipulated the metaphoricity of simple noun + verb + ending sentences by using either a metaphoric noun or a metaphoric verb or both. Our results show that metaphoric nouns affect sentence comprehension to a greater extent than do metaphoric verbs. Thus, even though there were no sentence-reading time differences between metaphoric and literal targets, metaphoric nouns were read more slowly than were literal nouns, and they also affected the reading time of the following verb. Moreover, in trials involving metaphoric-noun targets, participants read the endings of the targets faster and made more mistakes in answering posttrial questions than they did in literal-noun trials. We argue that these results suggest a comprehension deficit for anaphoric noun metaphors even when they are preceded by a context.     

Comprehending idioms cross-linguistically

Speakers of three different languages (English, Latvian, and Mandarin) rated sets of idioms from their language for the analyzability of the relationship between each phrase's literal and figurative meaning. For each language, subsets of idioms were selected based on these ratings. Latvian and Mandarin idioms were literally translated into English. Across three experiments, people classified idioms from the three languages according to their figurative meanings. Response times and error rates indicate that participants were able to interpret unfamiliar (e.g., other languages') idioms depending largely on the degree to which they were analyzable, and that different forms of processing were used both within and between languages depending on this analyzability. Results support arguments for a continuum of analyzability (Bortfeld & McGlone, 2001), along which figurative speech ranges from reflecting general conceptual structures to specific cultural and historical references.     

Conceptual clusters in figurative language production

Although most prior research on figurative language examines comprehension, several recent studies on the production of such language have proved to be informative. One of the most noticeable traits of figurative language production is that it is produced at a somewhat random rate with occasional bursts of highly figurative speech (e.g., Corts & Pollio, 1999). The present article seeks to extend these findings by observing production during speech that involves a very high base rate of figurative language, making statistically defined bursts difficult to detect. In an analysis of three Baptist sermons, burst-like clusters of figurative language were identified. Further study indicated that these clusters largely involve a central root metaphor that represents the topic under consideration. An interaction of the coherence, along with a conceptual understanding of a topic and the relative importance of the topic to the purpose of the speech, is offered as the most likely explanation for the clustering of figurative language in natural speech.     

Mechanisms that improve referential access

Two mechanisms, suppression and enhancement, are proposed to improve referential access. Enhancement improves the accessibility of previously mentioned concepts by increasing or boosting their activation; suppression improves concepts' accessibility by decreasing or dampening the activation of other concepts. Presumably, these mechanisms are triggered by the informational content of anaphors. Six experiments investigated this proposal by manipulating whether an anaphoric reference was made with a very explicit, repeated name anaphor or a less explicit pronoun. Subjects read sentences that introduced two participants in their first clauses, for example, "Ann predicted that Pam would lose the track race," and the sentences referred to one of the two participants in their second clauses, "but Pam/she came in first very easily." While subjects read each sentence, the activation level of the two participants was measured by a probe verification task. The first two experiments demonstrated that explicit, repeated name anaphors immediately trigger the enhancement of their own antecedents and immediately trigger the suppression of other (nonantecedent) participants. The third experiment demonstrated that less explicit, pronoun anaphors also trigger the suppression of other nonantecedents, but they do so less quickly--even when, as in the fourth experiment, the semantic information to identify their antecedents occurs prior to the pronouns (e.g., "Ann predicted that Pam would lose the track race. But after winning the race, she..."). The fifth experiment demonstrated that more explicit pronouns--pronouns that match the gender of only one participant-trigger suppression more powerfully. A final experiment demonstrated that it is not only rementioned participants who improve their referential access by triggering the suppression of other participants; newly introduced participants do so too (e.g., "Ann predicted that Pam would lose the track race, but Kim..."). Thus, both suppression and enhancement improve referential access, and the contribution of these two mechanisms is a function of explicitness. The role of these two mechanisms in mediating other referential access phenomena is also discussed.     

Comprehending homographs in aphasia

This study assessed 13 aphasic subjects' knowledge of the multiple meanings of homographs. The results indicated that the various meanings were less available to aphasic subjects than to normal subjects. In addition, specific meanings became less available as they became less typical although the number of meanings associated with a homograph did not influence performance. Aphasia type also did not influence performance. Performance on the experimental test was significantly correlated with auditory comprehension level and picture naming ability. The results were related to recent findings on semantic organization in aphasia.     

The development of figurative language in children

Children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades were asked to do three different tasks in an attempt to determine their ability to use figurative language. Results for a Composition task showed that children produced a greater number of frozen than novel figures and that the absolute level of such usage decreased over grades. Results for a Multiple Sentences task revealed that children produced more frozen than novel figures and that both showed a marked increase over grade. Results for a Comparisons task indicated that figurative language increased over grade, and that for this task children used more novel than frozen figures. Taken in conjunction with earlier work, these data suggest that children are able to use figurative language well before theycan explain the exact nature of the relationship linking elements of the figure. In Piagetian terms, this implies that children use figurative language in the stage of concrete operations but cannot explain such usage until the stage of formal operations.This research was supported in part by Grant PEG-4-71-0066 from the Region IV Office of Education.     

Ardent realism without referential normativity

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a central positive claim in Matti Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts: that a certain kind of metaphysically ambitious realist about normativity – the ardent realist – is committed to the metasemantic idea that the distinctive inferential role of normative concepts suffices to fix the extension of those concepts. I argue first that commitment to this sort of inferential role metasemantic view does nothing to secure ardent realism. I then show how the ardent realist can address Eklund’s leading challenge without appeal to distinctively metasemantic commitments.