Publications

Pissani, L., Genovesi, C., & de Almeida, R. G. (under review). Aptness reduces, but concreteness enhances access to the literal meaning of a metaphor during sentence comprehension.

Pissani, L., & Demberg, V. (under review). Speech cues influence the interpretation of gestures even when unrelated

Pissani, L., Scholman, M., & Demberg, V. (under review). Working memory and vocabulary knowledge sustain activation of the literal meaning of metaphors during sentence comprehension

Pissani, L., Jobanputra, M., & Demberg, V. (under review). LLMs predict metaphor norms based on word co-occurrence but struggle with relational and sensory dimensions

Pissani, L., & de Almeida, R. G. (2026). Metaphors in context and in isolation: Familiarity, aptness, concreteness, metaphoricity, and structure norms for 300 two-word expressions. Behavior Research Methods, 58(1), 31. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02902-0

Pissani, L., Meiser, M., & Demberg, V. (2025). Music-induced Positive Mood Stimulates Metaphor Production. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3d56910q

Dzhubaeva, N., Trinley, K., & Pissani, L. (2025). Unstructured Minds, Predictable Machines: A Comparative Study of Narrative Cohesion in Human and LLM Stream-of-Consciousness Writing. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) (pp. 1079-1096). Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-srw.85.pdf

Pissani, L., & de Almeida, R. G. (2023). Early birds can fly: Awakening the literal meaning of conventional metaphors further downstream. Metaphor and Symbol, 38(4), 346-362. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2023.2225561

Pissani, L., & de Almeida, R. G. (2022). Can you mend a broken heart? Awakening conventional metaphors in the maze. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29(1), 253-261.  https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01985-y

Pissani, L., & de Almeida, R. G. (2022). What happens to the literal meanings of metaphors? A review and a “minimalist” proposal. In M. Liu & S. Rotter (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application”. https://conceptresearch.github.io/CARLA/carla_workshop/abstracts_2022/Pissani_de-Almeida.pdf

Roncero, C., de Almeida, R. G., Pissani, L., & Patalas, I. (2021). A metaphor is not like a simile: Reading-time evidence for distinct interpretations for negated tropes. Metaphor and Symbol, 36(2), 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1882258

Pissani, L. (2017). Peru e Brasil: experiências no mundo académico à luz do modelo de seis dimensões culturais de Hofstede. Revista Escrita, 22(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.escrita.28839

Pissani, L. (2016). Os ditados no ensino de espanhol como língua estrangeira: estrutura e processos semânticos. Revista Pesquisas em Discurso Pedagógico, 10(2), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.PDPe.28280