This paper illustrates the neural mechanisms underlying language processing. Based on evidence from neuroscience, theNeural Theory of Language supports the idea that, to fully understand an utterance, one should be able to imagine thescene evoked by that utterance. To achieve that, brain regions responsible for the action associated with that utteranceare activated in order to mentally simulate the action that is being described. In this report, I propose four activities thatimplement these findings to language teaching in order to boost the learning process and provide meaningful content, notonly about language itself but also about the processes behind.

Conventional metaphors such as early bird are interpreted rather fast and efficiently since they might be stored as lexicalized, non-compositional expressions. Pissani and de Almeida (2020, submitted) showed that, after reading metaphors (John is an early bird so he can…), participants took longer and were less accurate selecting the continuing word (attend) when it was paired with a literally related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry) in a maze task. This suggests that the literal meaning of a conventional metaphor is available immediately afterward. But does the availability of the literal meaning remain further downstream? We examined whether this effect is replicated when there is a medium (6–8 words) and a large (11–13 words) distance between metaphor and word selection. Results indicated that the awakening effect persists but decreases significantly as word distance increases, suggesting that the literal meaning is still available downstream but fades rapidly.

How do children within the autism spectrum (ASD) integrate linguistic and visual information during real-time processing of sentences and dynamic scenes? We employed a visual word paradigm with sentences containing different verb types (causatives such as 'crack'; perception/psychological verbs such as 'examine') and with different scene contexts (agent in the scene moving towards a target object or remaining neutral). Participants were a group of 10-year old ASD and typically developing children (TD). We reasoned that the two dominant theories about ASD cognitive processing style—the weak central coherence theory (WCC) and the enhanced perceptual function (EPF)—make different predictions on how and where information about linguistic and visual information may be integrated. WCC predicts that ASD children would have greater difficulty with sentence and scene semantics while EPF predicts an early, post-perceptual integration via verb-specific and object (but not full scene) representations. The results suggest that ASD children differ from TD children by computing the link between verb and object faster, suggesting an enhanced post-perceptual integration.