Topic-vehicle interaction in metaphor comprehension

Metaphor processing: Referring and predicating

The general consensus emerging from decades of empirical investigation of metaphor processing is that, when appropriately contextualised, metaphorically used language is no more demanding of processing effort than literally used language. However, there is a small number of studies which contradict this position, notably Noveck, Bianco, and Castry (2001): they maintain that relevance-based pragmatic theory predicts increased cognitive costs incurred in deriving the extra effects that metaphors typically yield, and they provide experimental results that support this prediction. In our study, we first surveyed and assessed the tasks and stimulus materials of many experiments on metaphor processing from the 1970's to the present day. The most telling result was an apparent disparity between the processing of metaphorical language used predicatively versus referentially. We then ran two self-paced reading experiments to test our hypothesis that when used as a predicate, metaphorical language is no more costly than literal language, but when used referentially, it does incur extra costs, even given a preceding biasing context. In the first experiment, all metaphorical referring expressions were in subject position so occurred early in the sentence; in the second experiment, we controlled for any effect of sentence position by placing metaphorical referring expressions in object position, thus later in the sentence, similar to the predicate metaphors. In both cases, metaphorical referring incurred significantly greater costs relative to literal equivalents than did metaphorical predication, with no effect of sentence position. We end with a brief analysis of why the referential use of metaphor is special and effort-demanding.

Suppression of literal meaning in single and extended metaphors

Within Relevance Theory, it has been suggested that extended metaphors might be processed differently relative to single metaphoric uses. While single metaphors are hypothesized to be understood via the creation of an ad hoc concept, extended metaphors have been claimed to require a switch to a secondary processing mode, which gives greater prominence to the literal meaning. Initial experimental evidence has supported a distinction by showing differences in reading times between single and extended metaphors. However, beyond potential differences in comprehension speed, Robyn Carston’s ‘lingering of the literal’ account seems to predict qualitative differences in the interpretative mechanisms involved. In the present work, we test the hypothesis that during processing of extended metaphors, the mechanisms of enhancement and suppression of activation levels of literal-related features operate differently relative to single metaphors. We base our work on a study by Paula Rubio-Fernández, which showed that processing single metaphors involves suppressing features related exclusively to the literal meaning of the metaphoric vehicle after 1000 milliseconds of encountering the metaphor. Our goal was to investigate whether suppression is also involved in the comprehension of extended metaphors, or whether the ‘lingering of the literal’ leads to continued activation of literal-related features, as we take Carston’s account to predict. We replicate existing results, in as much as we find that activation levels of literal-related features are reduced after 1000 milliseconds. Critically, we also show that the pattern of suppression does not hold for extended metaphors, for which literal-related features remain activated after 1000 milliseconds. We see our results as providing support for Carston’s view that extended metaphor processing involves a prominent role of literal meaning, contributing towards explicating the links between theoretical predictions within Relevance Theory and online sentence processing.

Understanding Youth's Lived Experience of Anxiety through Metaphors: A Qualitative, Arts-Based Study

Living with anxiety can be a complex, biopsychosocial experience that is unique to each person and embedded in their contexts and lived worlds. Scales and questionnaires are necessary to quantify anxiety, yet these approaches are not always able to reflect the lived experience of psychological distress experienced by youth. Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, our research aimed to amplify the voices of youth living with anxiety. Fifty-eight youth living with anxiety took part in in-depth, open-ended interviews and participatory arts-based methods (photovoice and ecomaps). Analysis was informed by van Manen's method of data analysis with attention to lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived relationships, as well as the meanings of living with anxiety. Youth relied on the following metaphors to describe their experiences: A shrinking world; The heavy, heavy backpack; Play, pause, rewind, forward; and A fine balance. Overall, youth described their anxiety as a monster, contributing to feelings of fear, loss, and pain, but also hope. The findings from this study can contribute to the reduction of barriers in knowledge translation by encouraging the use of narrative and visual metaphors as a communicative tool to convey youth's lived experience of anxiety to researchers, clinicians, and the public.

The Role of Literal Features During Processing of Novel Verbal Metaphors

When a word is used metaphorically (for example “walrus” in the sentence “The president is a walrus”), some features of that word's meaning (“very fat,” “slow-moving”) are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features (“has large tusks,” “lives near the north pole”) are not. What happens to these features that relate only to the literal meaning during processing of novel metaphors? In four experiments, the present study examined the role of the feature of physical containment during processing of verbs of physical containment. That feature is used metaphorically to signify difficulty, such as “fenced in” in the sentence “the journalist's opinion was fenced in after the change in regime.” Results of a lexical decision task showed that video clips displaying a ball being trapped by a box facilitated comprehension of verbs of physical containment when the words were presented in isolation. However, when the verbs were embedded in sentences that rendered their interpretation metaphorical in a novel way, no such facilitation was found, as evidenced by two eye-tracking reading studies. We interpret this as suggesting that features that are critical for understanding the encoded meaning of verbs but are not part of the novel metaphoric interpretation are ignored during the construction of metaphorical meaning. Results and limitations of the paradigm are discussed in relation to previous findings in the literature both on metaphor comprehension and on the interaction between language comprehension and the visual world.

Do metaphorical sharks bite? Simulation and abstraction in metaphor processing

In a metaphor such as lawyers are sharks, the concept lawyers, which is the metaphor topic, and the concept sharks, which is the metaphor vehicle, interact to produce a figurative meaning such that lawyers are predatory. Some theorists argue that sensorimotor properties of the vehicle are the basis of metaphor comprehension. Accordingly, the metaphor lawyers are sharks is processed as a simulation in which bodily actions related to sharks are accessed (e.g., sharks chasing prey). In contrast, the long-standing assumption is that metaphors are processed as abstractions with no role played by sensorimotor properties. From this theoretical perspective, abstract characteristics of sharks (e.g., vicious, predatory) are argued to be the core properties involved in metaphor processing. Here, we juxtapose these two opposing views of metaphor processing using cross-modal lexical priming. We find evidence that low-familiar metaphors (e.g., highways are snakes) prime bodily-action associates (i.e., slither) but not abstraction associates (i.e., danger), and are hence processed via simulation, whereas high-familiar metaphors (e.g., lawyers are sharks) prime abstraction associates (i.e., killer) but not bodily-action associates (i.e., bite) and are therefore processed via abstraction. The results align with views of cognition and language that posit the presence of both embodied and abstract representations.

Non-literal understanding and psychosis: Metaphor comprehension in individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia

Previous studies suggest that understanding of non-literal expressions, and in particular metaphors, can be impaired in people with schizophrenia; although it is not clear why. We explored metaphor comprehension capacity using a novel picture selection paradigm; we compared task performance between people with schizophrenia and healthy comparator subjects and we further examined the relationships between the ability to interpret figurative expressions non-literally and performance on a number of other cognitive tasks. Eye-tracking was used to examine task strategy. We showed that even when IQ, years of education, and capacities for theory of mind and associative learning are factored in as covariates, patients are significantly more likely to interpret metaphorical expressions literally, despite eye-tracking findings suggesting that patients are following the same interpretation strategy as healthy controls. Inhibitory control deficits are likely to be one of multiple factors contributing to the poorer performance of our schizophrenia group on the metaphor trials of the picture selection task.

Seeing Context through Metaphor: Using Communications Research to Bring a Social Determinants Perspective to Public Thinking about Child Abuse and Neglect

Human beings think in metaphor and reason through analogy. The metaphors through which we think influence how we understand and feel about social issues as well as the actions that we see as appropriate and important. Metaphors can be used to increase understanding of how issues work and increase the salience of a given issue, build support for programs and policies necessary to address the issue, and instigate demand for change and civic action. In this paper, we use a mixed methods research design, including brief qualitative interviews, experimental surveys, and focus groups, to test the ability of different metaphors to influence public understanding of the social determinants of child abuse and neglect in the UK. We find one metaphor in particular that improves people's understanding of the social causes of child maltreatment and increases support for structural solutions. This metaphor can be used to build support for preventative public health solutions.

Novel metaphor comprehension: Semantic neighbourhood density interacts with concreteness

Previous research suggests that metaphor comprehension is affected both by the concreteness of the topic and vehicle and their semantic neighbours (Kintsch, 2000; Xu, 2010). However, studies have yet to manipulate these 2 variables simultaneously. To that end, we composed novel metaphors manipulated on topic concreteness and semantic neighbourhood density (SND) of topic and vehicle. In Experiment 1, participants rated the metaphors on the suitability (e.g. sensibility) of their topic-vehicle pairings. Topic concreteness interacted with SND such that participants rated metaphors from sparse semantic spaces to be more sensible than those from dense semantic spaces and preferred abstract topics over concrete topics only for metaphors from dense semantic spaces. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used presentation deadlines and found that topic concreteness and SND affect the online processing stages associated with metaphor comprehension. We discuss how the results are aligned with established psycholinguistic models of metaphor comprehension.

What Are We Playing at? Theatre, Organization, and the Use of Metaphor

This article addresses the question of how metaphor works and illustrates this with an explication of the ‘organization as theatre’ metaphor. It is argued that the so-called comparison account of metaphor that has dominated organization studies to date is flawed, misguided, and incapable of accounting for the fact that metaphors generate inferences beyond the similarities required for comprehending the metaphor and that metaphoric understanding is creative, with the features of importance being emergent rather than existing antecedently. A new model of metaphor for organizational theorizing is therefore proposed in this article and illustrated through an extended discussion and explication of the ‘organization as theatre’ metaphor. This explication shows furthermore that the ‘organization as theatre’ metaphor has not broken any new ground or led to any conceptual advances in organization theory, but has just provided a language of theatre (actors, scenes, scripts, and so on) for framing and communicating identity and role enactment within organizations. Constitutive principles and governing rules are derived from this model and from detailing the ‘organization as theatre’ metaphor, which, it is suggested, can guide theorists and researchers in their use of metaphor in organization studies.

Semantic properties, aptness, familiarity, conventionality, and interpretive diversity scores for 84 metaphors and similes

For 84 unique topic-vehicle pairs (e.g., knowledge-power), participants produced associated properties for the topics (e.g., knowledge), vehicles (e.g., power), metaphors (knowledge is power), and similes (knowledge is like power). For these properties, we also obtained frequency, saliency, and connotativeness scores (i.e., how much the properties deviated from the denotative or literal meaning). In addition, we examined whether expression type (metaphor vs. simile) impacted the interpretations produced. We found that metaphors activated more salient properties than did similes, but the connotativeness levels for metaphor and simile salient properties were similar. Also, the two types of expressions did not differ across a wide range of measures collected: aptness, conventionality, familiarity, and interpretive diversity scores. Combined with the property lists, these interpretation norms constitute a thorough collection of data about metaphors and similes, employing the same topic-vehicle words, which can be used in psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience studies to investigate how the two types of expressions are represented and processed. These norms should be especially useful for studies that examine the online processing and interpretation of metaphors and similes, as well as for studies examining how properties related to metaphors and similes affect the interpretations produced.

Structure-mapping in metaphor comprehension

Metaphor has a double life. It can be described as a directional process in which a stable, familiar base domain provides inferential structure to a less clearly specified target. But metaphor is also described as a process of finding commonalities, an inherently symmetric process. In this second view, both concepts may be altered by the metaphorical comparison. Whereas most theories of metaphor capture one of these aspects, we offer a model based on structure-mapping that captures both sides of metaphor processing. This predicts (a) an initial processing stage of symmetric alignment; and (b) a later directional phase in which inferences are projected to the target. To test these claims, we collected comprehensibility judgments for forward (e.g., "A rumor is a virus") and reversed ("A virus is a rumor") metaphors at early and late stages of processing, using a deadline procedure. We found an advantage for the forward direction late in processing, but no directional preference early in processing. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed.

[A review of metaphor research]

The study of the metaphor is interdisciplinary and focuses mostly on three points in cognitive psychology: (a) the cognition of metaphoricity, (b) metaphor comprehension processes, and (c) the reason why one concept is represented by another concept as a metaphor. This article reviews the history of research on the metaphor from these three perspectives. Most recent studies support the following viewpoints. Metaphor comprehension is as quick and automatic as literal comprehension. Metaphor comprehension entails the processes of comparison and abstraction. The reason why one concept is compared with another concept is strongly related with the motivation process of combination between different concepts such as embodied cognition.

Is the language of intentional psychology an efficient tool for evolutionists?

The language of intentional psychology is commonly used as a means of addressing issues concerning selection. This habit is generally considered an efficient shorthand, but oft-reported misunderstandings leave room for doubt. I stress the general point that efficiency of a mode of expression is an empirical matter, deserving the same treatment, theoretically and methodologically, as other such matters. Mistaken assumptions regarding the relevant cognitive capacities may make for inefficient communication, and discourse about human evolution is a plausible case in point.

The psycholinguistics of metaphor

Can lawyers be sharks, can jobs literally be jails, and can dogs fly across lawns? Such metaphors create novel categories that enable us to characterize the topic of interest. These novel metaphorical categories are special in that they are based on outstanding exemplars of those categories, and they borrow the exemplar's name for use as the category names. Thus 'shark' can be taken as a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being. Contemporary research reveals how people can create and understand such metaphors in ordinary conversation, and suggests that we understand metaphorical meanings as quickly and automatically as we understand literal meanings.