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3Early Birds Can Fly: Awakening the Literal Meaning of Conventional Metaphors Further DownstreamMetaphor and Symbol 38 (4): 346-362. 2023.When someone says, John is an early bird … and continues so he can fly to the morning classes, attention is being called to the literal meaning of the conventional metaphor early bird—perhaps as a...
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Introduction: a Fodor's guide to cognitive scienceIn Roberto G. De Almeida & Lila R. Gleitman (eds.), On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at its Core, Oup Usa. 2017.
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Semantics for a moduleIn Roberto G. De Almeida & Lila R. Gleitman (eds.), On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at its Core, Oup Usa. 2017.
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16A metaphor is not like a simile: reading-time evidence for distinct interpretations for negated tropesMetaphor and Symbol 36 (2): 85-98. 2021.Studies have suggested that metaphors (Lawyers are sharks) and similes (Lawyers are like sharks) have distinct representations: metaphors engender more figurative and abstract properties, whereas similes engender more literal properties. We investigated to what extent access to such representations occurs automatically, during on-line reading. In particular, we examined whether similes convey a more literal meaning by following the metaphors and similes with explanations that expressed either a …Read more
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7Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate SentencesFrontiers in Psychology 12. 2021.What are the roles of semantic and pragmatic processes in the interpretation of sentences in context? And how do we attain such interpretations when sentences are deemed indeterminate? Consider a sentence such as “Lisa began the book” which does not overtly express the activity that Lisa began doing with the book. Although it is believed that individuals compute a specified event to enrich the sentential representation – yielding, e.g., “began [reading] the book” – there is no evidence that a de…Read more
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7Understanding Events by Eye and Ear: Agent and Verb Drive Non-anticipatory Eye Movements in Dynamic ScenesFrontiers in Psychology 10 435466. 2019.As Macnamara (1978) once asked, how can we talk about what we see? We report on a study manipulating realistic dynamic scenes and sentences aiming to understand the interaction between linguistic and visual representations in real-world situations. Specifically, we monitored participants’ eye movements as they watched video clips of everyday scenes while listening to sentences describing these scenes. We manipulated two main variables. The first was the semantic class of the verb in the sentence…Read more
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123The Neuronal Correlates of Indeterminate Sentence Comprehension: An fMRI StudyFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 178942. 2016.Sentences such as "The author started the book" are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun "book" to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity i…Read more
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17On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at its Core (edited book)Oup Usa. 2017.What are the landmarks of the cognitive revolution? What are the core topics of modern cognitive science? Where is cognitive science heading to? Leading cognitive scientists--Chomsky, Pylyshyn, Gallistel, and others--examine their own work in relation to one of cognitive science's most influential and polemical figures: Jerry Fodor.
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Vector transmission of bacterial plant pathogens involves three steps: pathogen acquisition from an infected host, retention within the vector, and inoculation of cells into susceptible tissue of an uninfected plant. In this study, a combination of plant and artificial diet systems were used to determine the importance of several genes on the initial adhesion and retention of the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa to an efficient insect vector. Mutant strains included fimbrial and afimbrial adhesins a…Read more
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27The importance of being apt: metaphor comprehension in Alzheimer's diseaseFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
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15Aptness Predicts Metaphor Preference in the Lab and on the InternetMetaphor and Symbol 31 (1): 31-46. 2016.Experimental studies have suggested that variables such as aptness or conventionality are predictors of people’s preference for expressing a particular topic–vehicle pair as either a metaphor or a simile. In the present study, we investigated if such variables would also be predictive within a more naturalistic context, where other variables, such as the intention to include an explanation, may also influence people’s decision. Specifically, we investigated the production of metaphor and simile …Read more
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138Conceptual deficits without features: A view from atomismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3): 482-483. 2001.Humphreys and Forde fail to account for the ontology of the “features” that they claim are constitutive of concepts. This failure is common to decompositional theories of conceptual representation. Category-specific deficits can be better explained by a theory that takes inferential relations among atomic concepts to be the key characteristic of conceptual representation and processing.