Older adults may experience certain forms of cognitive decline, but some forms of semantic memory remain intact in older age. To address how metaphor comprehension changes with age and whether metaphor comprehension relies more heavily on analogical reasoning (supported by fluid intelligence) or on conceptual combination (supported by crystalized intelligence), we compared performance of younger and older adults. In two experiments, healthy older adults (54-88 years) scored lower on a measure of fluid intelligence (Ravens Progressive Matrices) but higher on a measure of crystalized intelligence (Mill Hill Vocabulary Test) relative to younger adults (18-34 years). Groups were equally successful in comprehending relatively easy metaphors (Study 1), but older adults showed a striking advantage over younger adults for novel literary metaphors (Study 2). Mixed-effects modeling showed that measures of fluid and crystalized intelligence each made separable contributions to metaphor comprehension for both groups, but older adults relied more on crystalized intelligence than did younger adults. These age-related dissociations clarify cognitive effects of aging and highlight the importance of crystalized intelligence for metaphor comprehension in both younger and older adults. 

This article presents a study that investigated students’ attitudes toward both online and face-to-face English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. The study was conducted with students of mechanical engineering and engineering management after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions that allowed face-to-face teaching to resume. The study aimed to determine students’ preferences for online or face-to-face classes and the reasons behind their opinions. It also aimed to compare the difficulty and interest level of EAP classes with other courses and gather qualitative feedback on how online EAP classes could be improved. The study was primarily quantitative, but it had a qualitative segment, too. The results indicated that students generally prefer face-to-face to online classes, although only marginally. Participants appreciated the ability to work from home and revisit recorded lessons in online classes, while face-to-face classes were valued for better communication with the instructor and collaboration with peers. English was viewed as better suited to online teaching than other courses, but students were hesitant to participate openly during classes. Most respondents suggested more active participation from students and mandatory attendance as ways of improving the online teaching process. 

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of translating literary metaphors from Serbian to English on metaphor quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity. The research involved 55 Serbian metaphors translated into English using the A is B form, which were then evaluated by 252 participants in two separate studies. Study 1 served as an extension of a previous norming study. In it, a group of participants assessed 55 translated literary metaphorical expressions, and their evaluations were compared to those of the original Serbian versions. In Study 2, a group of participants, divided into two subgroups, rated a collection of both the original metaphorical expressions and their translated counterparts. The results indicate that the translated metaphors generally scored higher in terms of aptness, familiarity, quality, and partially in metaphoricity. These findings suggest that translating the metaphors into English had a positive impact on their perceived effectiveness and familiarity. Several factors are considered to explain these outcomes, including the nature of the English language itself, the participants’ exposure to English, and the translation process. Overall, this study highlights the influence of translation on the perception of literary metaphors and provides insights into metaphor interpretation.

Ovo istraživanje je imalo za cilj da ispita uticaj prevođenja književnih metafora sa srpskog na engleski jezik na ocenjivanje kvaliteta metafore, sposobnosti izvora da opiše cilj, metaforičnosti i stepena poznatosti. Istraživanje je obuhvatilo 55 metafora u obliku A je B, uz ocene ukupno 252 ispitanika u dva odvojena zadatka. Prvi zadatak je predstavljao produžetak prethodnog istraživanja normiranja. U njemu su ispitanici ocenjivali 55 prevedenih književnih metaforičnih izraza, a njihove ocene upoređene su sa ocenama originalnih metafora na srpskom. U drugom zadatku su dve podgrupe ispitanika ocenjivale suženi izbor originalnih metaforičnih izraza i njihovih prevoda. Rezultati pokazuju da su prevedene metafore dobile više ocene za prilagodljivost, poznatost, kvalitet i delimično za metaforičnost. Ovo ukazuje na to da je prevođenje metafora na engleski imalo pozitivan uticaj na njihovu percipiranu efektivnost i poznatost. Postoji nekoliko faktora koji mogu da rasvetle ovakve rezultate, poput prirode engleskog jezika, izloženosti učesnika engleskom i samog procesa prevođenja.

Despite the exceptional performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and reasoning, there has been sharp disagreement as to whether their abilities extend to more creative human abilities. A core example is the interpretation of novel metaphors. Given the enormous and non-curated text corpora used to train LLMs, a serious obstacle to designing tests is the need to obtain novel yet high-quality metaphors that are unlikely to have been included in the training data. Here we assessed the ability of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, to provide natural-language interpretations of novel literary metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry and translated into English. Human judges—blind to the fact that an AI model was involved—rated metaphor interpretations generated by GPT-4 as superior to those provided by a group of college students. In interpreting reversed metaphors, GPT-4, as well as humans, exhibited signs of sensitivity to the Gricean cooperative principle. These results indicate that LLMs such as GPT-4 have acquired an emergent ability to interpret literary metaphors.

Given that the use and comprehension of figurative language is one of the most intriguing abilities of the mind, this study extends the line of research related to the process of understanding figurative language to individual differences. The starting assumption is that individual differences affect our ability to understand figurative language, focusing on fluid and crystallized intelligence. These types of intelligence were measured in relation to the ability t1o understand metaphors, and their influence was investigated indirectly, through tests that reliably examine both types of intelligence. The research investigates non-literary metaphors in the Serbian language, normed according to the following dimensions: metaphoricity, aptness, and familiarity. This study seeks to show whether and to what extent fluid and/or crystallized intelligence influence the process of understanding non-literary metaphors normed according to different features. Through selected verbal and non-verbal tests, Raven’s progressive matrices (Raven, 1938), semantic similarities test (Stamenković, Ichien, & Holyoak, 2019a), as well as a non-literary metaphor comprehension test, it is determined in which way fluid and crystallized intelligence play roles in the process of metaphor comprehension, as well as which possible cognitive mechanism allows us to process metaphors. The results show that the comprehension of non-literary metaphors mostly relies on crystallized intelligence, while fluid intelligence seems to be employed in individual cases, only with some groups of metaphors.

Multimodal characteristics of first-aid instructional materials have been extensively investigated in several previous studies (e.g., Van der Sluis, Vergeer, & Redeker, 2018; Van der Sluis et al., 2022; Wildfeuer et al., 2023). Starting from these studies, in our investigation, we narrow the focus to the portrayal of help givers in pictorial instructions, aiming to uncover the attributes associated with these representations across various formats and ways of depicting (for instance, as drawings or photographs, in colour or monochrome, simple or detailed, having different sets of characters, etc.). Drawing from a corpus of 40 selected images collected within the PAT project (see Van der Sluis & Redeker, 2019), participants evaluated these depictions using contrasting adjectival traits, presented in pairs, as outlined by Peabody (1987). Our empirical findings yield several relevant insights, indicating that favourable perceptions are often correlated with specific visual features, including colouration, perspective, and the portrayed gender of the depicted help giver. We believe that these results could have significant implications for the design of future first-aid instructional materials, advocating for more deliberate and effective representations, which could enrich learning experiences and user engagement in health education. This could, in turn, improve design-related decisions and allow them to communicate crucial health information more efficiently and optimize situation comprehension within health-educational frameworks.

Using poetic metaphors in the Serbian language, we identified systematic variations in the impact of fluid and crystalized intelligence on comprehension of metaphors that varied in rated aptness and familiarity. Overall, comprehension scores were higher for metaphors that were high rather than low in aptness, and high rather than low in familiarity. A measure of crystalized intelligence was a robust predictor of comprehension across the full range of metaphors, but especially for those that were either relatively unfamiliar or more apt. In contrast, individual differences associated with fluid intelligence were clearly found only for metaphors that were low in aptness. Superior verbal knowledge appears to be particularly important when trying to find meaning in novel metaphorical expressions, and also when exploring the rich interpretive potential of apt metaphors. The broad role of crystalized intelligence in metaphor comprehension is consistent with the view that metaphors are largely understood using semantic integration processes continuous with those that operate in understanding literal language.

Most translation tasks in the entertainment industry involve multiple modes of communication, i.e. they are multimodal, not solely language-based. A translator is expected to analyse, evaluate and transfer each of those modes to render an accurate translation of the source text. This is especially important in films, documentaries, TV and animated shows – multimodal scripts which are being localised for various contexts. An important step in the translation process in the entertainment industry should be the identification of translation errors in the final product which should be based on a proper translation error classification. Given that available translation error classifications rely solely on linguistic modes of communication, the aim of this paper is to propose a multimodal translation error classification which would be based on the multimodality of scripts to be translated and thus provide a reliable tool for the quality check of the final translation product in the entertainment industry. In that way, translators in this industry will be alerted to recognise elements (e.g. tone of voice, facial expressions, proximity, etc.) existing in multimodal scripts where both the source and the target texts as essential parts of the scripts are multimodal products

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of distributing knowledge and providing practical skills for saving a life. Compared to the genre of serious games in which players are trained as exports or layperson first-aiders within an interactive gameplay, VR applications potentially represent an even more complex communicative environment. Additional semiotic resources such as touch, body movements and proprioception (cf. Martin et al. 2022) are used to construct the virtual world and instruct players to perform certain procedures. From a multimodal perspective (cf. Bateman et al. 2017), the communicative situations constructed by the virtual environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity and ergodicity and it is particularly challenging to address these analytically. Especially the cyberphysical infrastructure provided in these applications add to the complexity by embedding holograms, 360-degree videos, etc. which need to be taken into consideration in the analysis of the instructional techniques. While there is now research on e-learning strategies such as serious games (e.g. Boada et al. 2020) and mobile apps (e.g. Metelmann et al. 2018), not much work has been done with regard to the (multimodal) design of VR applications and how these can be used to teach resuscitation and other procedures. It will therefore be interesting to address this question from a qualitative perspective with future potential for empirical research on the effectiveness of these applications. In this talk, we will address the analytical challenges by looking at two different examples of VR applications for first aid (Lifesaver VR, Resuscitation Council UK; Basic Life Support, Dual Good Health) and providing a foundational framework for the multimodal analysis of the communicative situations created in these two applications based on our previous work on video games (Wildfeuer & Stamenković 2022). The data to work with are recordings of the initial usage of the applications as provided by the production companies. We aim to not only show how recent developments in multimodality research are well-equipped for the effective analysis of these artifacts, but also how the analytical results can be practically implemented in the further development of these applications.

This article intends to provide insight into how speakers of English, Mandarin, and Serbian perceive spatio-temporal relations expressed by specific pairs of adverbials. In two studies participants were presented with simple sentences describing the metaphorical movement of events on the timeline (e.g., "The meeting was moved from the morning to the afternoon.") and were asked to decide whether the event had been moved along the sagittal, vertical or transverse axis (forward/backward, up/down, left/right). The main aim of the first study, which was conducted with 104 native speakers of Serbian, was to explore the effects of axis-orientation and individual time units on participants' preferences and response times. The target time units used were dates, hours, months, days of the week, and years. The results showed significant differences in response times between the transverse and sagittal axis conditions on the one hand (with shorter reaction times), and the vertical axis condition on the other. Moreover, the distribution of answers showed a high degree of inconsistency when it came to moving events to a previous point in time. The main aim of the second study was to identify potential differences in responses and response times to different orientations and time units between four experimental groups: native speakers of English with no second language, native speakers of English with knowledge of a second language, native speakers of Mandarin (with English as a second language), and native speakers of Serbian (also with English as a second language). The study was conducted with 126 participants. The design of the second study was largely parallel to that of the first, but it involved three trials and different time units (parts of the day, days of the week and months). The Mandarin speakers gave the quickest responses in the first two trials when deciding on the vertical axis. Moreover, reaction times were significantly shorter in the parts-of-the-day condition (e.g., "morning", "afternoon"), across the three trials. In addition, Mandarin speakers showed an inverted trend in responses on the sagittal axis compared to the remaining three groups. While some of our results corroborate previous research on the topic, the study also provides novel empirical evidence on how Serbian speakers conceptualize time using spatial terms.