The aim of this study was to examine the image-schematic representations that arise from sentences referring toconcrete/abstract action in Japanese verbs. We used a free positioning task that required the participants to draw the position ofan object in a sentence referring to an agent’s concrete/abstract action and a simple rating task that investigated the agent’s needfor body movement and emotional evaluation for the object. The results showed that the drawn object’s position in not only aconcrete but also an abstract action sentence is changed before and after the action. Further, the results indicated that the heightand distance from the agent to the object in the sentence is related to the emotional evaluation of the agent for the object in thesentence.

Changes in students learning approaches/attitudes when transitioning from high schools to universities is an importanttopic in Japanese higher education researches. In previous Japanese research, case studies have discussed students learningexperiences and attitudes in high schools and universities. However, most of them only discussed the difference and thesimilarity between high school and university and did not suggest the ways of connecting two different or similar learningsystems. The present study conducted surveys using two questionnaires that examined first-year undergraduate studentslearning experience in high school, learning attitude at the start of the semester, and learning experience and attitude at theend of the semester. The analysis of the startend of the semester suggests there were two different learning attitudes: onethat is continued from high school and difficult to be affected by the learning experience in university and the other that ischangeable through active and communicative learning experiences in university.

This paper discusses the processing of topic meaning in metaphor comprehension, which consists not only of the acceptance of metaphor-relevant meaning but also the rejection of metaphor-irrelevant meaning. Our study examined the rejection process of topic word (e.g., “lawyer”) that include an irrelevant meaning (e.g., “helps people”) in metaphor comprehension (e.g., “a lawyer is like a shark”) using a priming paradigm and meaningfulness decision task: an experimental study reveals that the metaphor-irrelevant meaning is activated prior to the rejection process of the irrelevant meaning in metaphor comprehension. Our results suggest that the processing of metaphor-irrelevant meaning is composed of two different stages.