As clear as glass: How figurativeness and familiarity impact simile processing in readers with and without dyslexia

Abstract

For skilled readers, idiomatic language confers faster access to overall meaning compared with non-idiomatic language, with a processing advantage for figurative over literal interpretation. However, currently very little research exists to elucidate whether atypical readers – such as those with developmental dyslexia – show such a processing advantage for figurative interpretations of idioms, or whether their reading impairment implicates subtle differences in semantic access. We wanted to know whether an initial figurative interpretation of similes, for both typical and dyslexic readers, is dependent on familiarity. Here, we tracked typical and dyslexic readers’ eye movements as they read sentences containing similes (e.g. as cold as ice), orthogonally manipulated for novelty (e.g. familiar: as cold as ice, novel: as cold as snow) and figurativeness (e.g. literal: as cold as ice [low temperature], figurative: as cold as ice [emotionally distant]), with figurativeness being defined by the sentence context. Both participant groups exhibited a processing advantage for familiar and figurative similes over novel and literal similes. However, compared to typical readers, participants with dyslexia had greater difficulty processing similes both when they were unfamiliar, and when the context biased the simile meaning toward a literal rather than a figurative interpretation. Our findings suggest a semantic processing anomaly in dyslexic readers, which we discuss in light of recent literature on sentence-level semantic processing.

The impact of phonological relatedness on semantic congruency judgements in readers with dyslexia: Evidence from behavioural judgements, event related potentials and pupillometry

“…To compensate for these difficulties, dyslexic readers often resort to using their intact conceptual-level knowledge to bootstrap access to meaning from text (Hulme and Snowling, 2014;Nation and Snowling, 1998;Snowling and Hulme, 2013), an ability that distinguishes them from readers with 'poor comprehension' or specific language impairment (Bishop and Snowling, 2004). Despite this, recent eyetracking and electrophysiological research shows evidence of subtle semantic processing differences in dyslexic readers, compared with their typical reading peers, both in accessing meaning at the whole sentence level (Egan et al, 2022;Schulz et al, 2008), and in delayed responses to incongruent items in word lists (Jednoróg et al, 2010;Rüsseler et al, 2007). Here, we examine -for the first time -dyslexic and typical readers' behavioural, neural, and autonomic arousal systems as they make semantic congruency judgements, in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of group differences in access to meaning, from the earliest processes through to behavioural output.…”