Bilingual Figurative Language Processing

Bilingual Figurative Language Processing is a timely book that provides a much-needed bilingual perspective to the broad field of figurative language. This is the first book of its kind to address how bilinguals acquire, store, and process figurative language, such as idiomatic expressions (such as kick the bucket), metaphors (such as lawyers are sharks), and irony, and how these tropes might interact in real time across the bilingual's two languages. This volume offers the reader and the bilingual student an overview of the major strands of research, both theoretical and empirical, currently being undertaken in this field of inquiry. At the same time, Bilingual Figurative Language Processing provides readers and undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience in the development of psycholinguistic experiments in bilingual figurative language. Each chapter includes a section on suggested student research projects. Selected chapters provide detailed procedures on how to design and develop psycholinguistic experiments.

Part I. Theoretical Implications: 1. Embodiment in metaphor and (not?) in bilingual language Albert Katz and Andrea Bowes; 2. Is the idiom principle blocked in bilingual L2 production? Istvan Kecskes; 3. Linking the figurative to the creative: bilinguals' comprehension of metaphors, jokes, and remote associates Jyotsna Vaid, Belem G. López and Francisco E. Martínez; Part II. Methodological Approaches: 4. Metaphoric reference: a real-time analysis Roberto R. Heredia and Mónica E. Muñoz; 5. Nonliteral language processing and methodological considerations Omar García, Anna B. Cieślicka and Roberto R. Heredia; Part III. Figurative Language Processing: 6. Contrasting bilingual and monolingual idiom processing Debra Titone, Georgie Columbus, Veronica Whitford, Julie Mercier and Maya Libben; 7. Idiom acquisition and processing by second/foreign language learners Anna B. Cieślicka; 8. Neurophysiological markers of phrasal verb processing: evidence from L1 and L2 speakers Silke Paulmann, Zainab Ghareeb-Ali and Claudia Felser; 9. Irony processing in L1 and L2: same or different? Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman; Part IV. Cross-Linguistic Approaches and Applied Issues: 10. Straight from the horse's mouth: idiomaticity revisited John I. Liontas; 11. Anger metaphors across languages: a cognitive linguistic perspective Zoltán Kövecses, Veronika Szelid, Eszter Nucz, Olga Blanco-Carrion, Elif Arica Akkök and Réka Szabó; 12. Gauging the semantic transparency of idioms: do natives and learners see eye to eye? Frank Boers and Stuart Webb.

Roberto R. Heredia, PhD, is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University. He served as chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences for two years. He is currently the director and principal investigator of a multimillion-dollar grant from the US Department of Education. He has published on bilingual memory, bilingual lexical representation, and bilingual nonliteral language processing. He is co-author of Bilingual Sentence Processing; An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes and Foundations of Bilingual Memory, and he was guest editor for Experimental Psychology.
Anna B. Cieślicka, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University. Her recent publications in Brain and Language and the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research explore hemispheric differences in the course of bilingual figurative language processing and factors affecting bilingual lexical access, such as language dominance, context, and salience. Dr Cieślicka is the recipient and principal investigator of a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation research grant to establish the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory to study the neurophysiology of bilingual language processing. She is also co-editor of Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research.