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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
'This groundbreaking book dares to venture not just in one but in two areas that are rarely visited by research in bilingualism and figurative language. Grounded in state-of-the-art theoretical, methodological, analytical, and experimental approaches, this volume offers cutting-edge research on acquisition, production, processing and comprehension of figurative language in the bilingual linguistic repertoire. The editors deserve our great admiration for bringing together a team of international researchers to cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from humor, metaphors and irony to negative sentiments in order to foreground applied and cross-linguistic issues.' Tej K. Bhatia, Syracuse University, New York 'This volume is the first to look at nonliteral language processing from a psycholinguistic and neuro-linguistic perspective. This is a major change - and improvement - over traditional approaches, in which the always-present idiomaticity and metaphorical side of words and larger expressions are basically ignored. The issues are discussed from various complementary perspectives, making this a must-read for students and researchers in the field of multilingual processing.' Kees de Bot, University of Groningen, The Netherlands 'This wide-ranging exploration of bilingual figurative language processing is extremely timely and valuable. Not only do the various contributions collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of research in this important area, but they also give the reader a very good sense of what research in this domain looks like and feels like. Supplementary student material at the end of each chapter provides a basis for students actually to begin doing such research on their own.' David Singleton, University of Pannonia, Hungary 'A fresh perspective on the production and comprehension of figurative language and how people acquire, store, and process it in multilingual settings.' American Journal of Psychology