Nine experiments involving young adults (N = 525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing. Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for the last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies when local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experiments, using varying baseline conditions, found that globally related material affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitation effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on naming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context effects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data.

Although subjective optimism is generally regarded as adaptive, people show a sharp decline in optimism when they anticipate self-relevant feedback in the near future. The authors discuss moderators of the shift in future outlooks as well as reasons for the shift. The authors propose that the shift can reflect a response to new information or an attempt to brace for undesired outcomes. Both explanations represent a response to an adaptive need to prepare for uncertain states of the world. Finally, the authors discuss unanswered questions and directions for future research.

This study describes an experiment that aimed to determine if performance differences exist in simultaneous interpreting by individuals with similar general cognitive abilities, but different skills specific to the task of simultaneous interpreting. Professional interpreters’ performance in simultaneous interpreting from English into Mandarin was compared to that of two groups of student interpreters, beginners and advanced. The results showed that the professional interpreters who were not different from students in their general working memory capacity outperformed student interpreters.This difference was attributed, at least in part, to the development of specific skills in managing competing demands on limited cognitive resources. One important domain-specific skill observed in this study is the ability to select more important ideas from the speech input under conditions where stringent task demands jeopardize completeness and accuracy of the output.Professional interpreters’ generally superior performance is discussed withinthe descriptive framework of working memory theory.

Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a metaphoric or a literal target reading. As had been found by Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos (1978), metaphoric targets were comprehended about as quickly as literals when context was long, but more slowly than literals when context was short. The latter result may have been due to the failure of computing a conceptual relationship between short context and metaphoric target; targets unrelated to prior context took as long to comprehend as metaphoric targets. Another experiment showed that metaphorically expressed targets were read more quickly when they followed metaphorically expressed context than when they followed literal context, but literal targets were read quickest when they followed literal context. These results are discussed within a schema framework and within a "process priming" hypothesis.Metaphors are hypothesized to have arisen at the very beginning of the conceptual evolution of language (Cassirer, 1923). Despite the importance of metaphors in language comprehension, relatively few theoretical and empirical enterprises have set out to explore figurative language. Early psycholinguistic theories explained metaphor comprehension within the associationist view. For example, Koen (1965) assumed that the literal and metaphoric interpretations of a word are established through linking verbal associations. In particular, Koen hypothesized that a word's metaphoric reading is derived from its literal reading through a search for common associations. Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977) rejected this associationist claim. They hypothesized that people infer a metaphoric meaning when it becomes apparent that a literal interpretation is unsatisfactory. This hypothesis was tested in a series of elegant studies in which subjects heard only one of a pair of metaphoric sentences about the same topic:(I) Billboards are warts on the landscape.(are ugly protrusions on a surface) (2) Billboards are the yellow pages of a highway.(tell you where to find business in the area)As in Richards (1936), billboards is referred to as "topic," and warts and yellow pages are "vehicles." The paraphrases in parentheses, called the "grounds," were not presented to subjects. In a recall task, it was found that relevant grounds (those that paraphrased the presented metaphoric sentence) were better recall cues than nonrelevant grounds (those that paraphrased the unpresented member of the metaphoric sentence pair). It was concluded that subjects must have inferred the relevant ground during the comprehension of the presented metaphoric sentence.Although recall tasks assess the product of comprehension, these tasks do not necessarily reflect computational operations as they occur during reading. To gain a more immediate look at the encoding of metaphoric and literal sentences, Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos (1978) recorded sentence reading times. They hypothesized that how a metaphoric target sentence is processed depends on the suff...

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