Papers by Asghar Iran-Nejad
Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1992
Journal of speech and hearing research, 1981
Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem ... more Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. This paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of 4 alternatives) the sentence they thought best completed the story. In Experiment 1 deaf children ranging in age from 9 to 17 years clearly demonstrated their ability to understand novel metaphorical uses of English. In Experiment 2, 14-year-old deaf children who were given feedback on four initial practice items selected the correct metaphorical alternative significantly more often than those who saw no practice items. The conclusion is that deaf children probably do not suffer from some special deficiency uniquely associated with metaphor.
This study investigated student engagement in class discussions in a university-level, literature... more This study investigated student engagement in class discussions in a university-level, literature-based writing class. The research questions were 1) Does multiple-source learning provide a new lens for the observation of reflective teaching and learning practices? 2) Is there evidence that shows that the practices adopted by one teacher actually relied on and fostered this kind of thinking among students, and if so, what were those practices? The participants were 22 university students and their instructor, chosen because of the instructor's interest in improving class discussions. Data were collected over one semester through videotapes, formal and informal interviews, and class documents and were analyzed using constant comparison. Results showed the instructor facilitated student engagement through probing questions. The instructor's use of symbolism, metaphors, and experiences within this class were teaching tools aimed not at fostering domain-specific, elaborative, one-right-answer interpretations but rather at recruiting multiple sources for creating multiple cross-domain perspectives.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
We examine how embodiment in biological activity is different from conceptual embodiment as refle... more We examine how embodiment in biological activity is different from conceptual embodiment as reflected in classic, modern, and postmodern perspectives on tacit knowledge. The central theme of the essay is how understanding is embodied conceptually and biofunctionally. We focus (a) on how biofunctional understanding (BU) is different from conceptual understanding (CU) and (b) on how the overall differences between these two types of embodied understanding are complementary. We show here from a conceptual perspective that embodiment theories have diverged on the meaning of embodiment; but convergence may be more likely across future perspectives if we first redefine the construct of tacit knowledge as tacit understanding and then define (explicit) CU as being directly grounded in tacit understanding, for the purpose of comparison with BU defined as being grounded in biological activity. We illustrate the complementary differences between conceptual and biofunctional embodiment of understanding first in the absence of language and then using a particular statement format and the implicit analogy of biofunctional embodiment in other bodily systems. We conclude with a suggestion about the directly uncovered but highly related embodiment of language in a section on future research.
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Papers by Asghar Iran-Nejad