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 (e.g., kick the bucket), metaphors (e.g., 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.

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.