Introducing BITTSy: The Behavioral Infant & Toddler Testing System.

This manuscript introduces BITTSy, the Behavioral Infant & Toddler Testing System. This software system is capable of running the headturn preference procedure, preferential looking, conditioned headturn, and visual fixation/habituation procedures. It uses only commercial-off-theshelf (COTS) hardware to implement the procedures in an affordable and space-efficient setup. The software package, example protocols and data sets, and manual are freely available and downloadable from go.umd.edu/BITTSy, making this entire set of procedures available to resource-limited labs. Researchers can easily use BITTSy at multiple sites in a uniform manner, resulting in a standardized, powerful research tool that can enhance cross-site research collaborations.

Metaphoric reference: when metaphors are not understood as easily as literal expressions.

Gibbs (1990) found that metaphoric referential descriptions take longer to read than literal references, in contrast to the usual result that metaphors and literal sentences are about equally easy to comprehend. This study was performed as an investigation of Gibb's finding. In Experiment 1, subjects received story contexts in which characters clearly shared knowledge relevant to the metaphoric referring term. In Experiment 2, we tried to ensure that the intended referent was very salient by mentioning it in the sentence just prior to the crucial sentence. Neither of these manipulations eliminated the large response time advantage for literal referring expressions. In Experiment 3, the same metaphors were used as sentence predicates rather than as referring expressions: the metaphors were no more difficult to understand than literal paraphrases. Possible explanations for the difficulty of metaphoric references, as opposed to metaphoric predicates, are discussed.