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

Can you mend a broken heart? Awakening conventional metaphors in the maze

Conventional metaphors such as broken heart are interpreted rather fast and efficiently. This is because they might be stored as lexicalized, noncompositional expressions. If so, they require sense retrieval rather than sense creation. But can their literal meanings be recovered or "awakened"? We examined whether the literal meaning of a conventional metaphor could be triggered by a later cue. In a maze task, participants (N = 40) read sentences word by word (e.g., John is an early bird so he can . . .) and were presented with a two-word choice. Participants took longer and were less accurate when the correct word (attend) was paired with a literally-related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry). This suggests that the literal meaning of a conventional metaphor is not circumvented, nor that metaphors simply involve sense retrieval. The metaphor awakening effect suggests that the mechanisms employed to process conventional metaphors are dynamic with both metaphorical sense and literal meaning being available.

The RK processor: A program for analysing metaphor and word feature-listing data

Feature-listing tasks are an invaluable resource for exploring how words, categories, and metaphors are represented. However, manually coding the generated features is time-consuming and expensive, and involves subjective judgments from the experimenter. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the "RK processor", a program that was developed in our lab to analyse metaphor feature data but which can also be applied to other feature-listing data. After detailing the steps of processing, we demonstrate that the processed feature data align with previous findings in which metaphor features were processed manually and that the processed features predict dimensions of metaphor judgments pertaining to comprehensibility and metaphor goodness. Lastly, we present several other applications for research on word similarity, compound words, categories and concepts, semantic ambiguity, incongruity resolution and computational modelling. The RK processor offers researchers a valuable tool to save time and resources and to maintain consistency in processing.

Evaluating the predication model of metaphor comprehension: Using word2vec to model best/worst quality judgments of 622 novel metaphors

In this paper our goal is to undertake a systematic assessment of the first, most widely known, and simplest computational model of metaphor comprehension, the predication model developed by Kintsch (Cognitive Science, 25(2), 173-202, 2000). 622 metaphors of the form "x is a y" were selected from a much larger set generated randomly. The metaphors were judged for quality using best/worst judgments, which asks judges to pick the best and worst metaphor from among four presented metaphors. The metaphors and their judgments have been publicly released. We modeled the judgments by extending Kintsch's predication model (2000) by systematically walking through the parameter space of that model. Our model successfully differentiated metaphors rated as good (> 1.5z) from metaphors rated as bad (< -1.5z; Cohen's d = 0.72) and was able to successfully classify good metaphors with an accuracy of 82.9%. However, it achieved a true negative rate below chance at 36.3% and had a resultantly low kappa of 0.037. The model could not distinguish unselected random metaphors from those selected by humans as having metaphorical potential. In a follow-up study we showed that the model's quality estimates reliably predict metaphor decision times, with better metaphors being judged more quickly than worse metaphors.

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.

Impaired comprehension of metaphorical expressions in very mild Alzheimer's disease

BACKGROUND

Brain-damaged patients often have difficulty understanding non-literal language. However, whether patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have comprehension deficits of metaphorical expressions, in contrast with non-metaphorical (literal) expressions, remains unclear.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

The subjects were 40 AD patients; 20 had mild AD (17-23 points on the Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE]), and 20 had very mild AD (≥24 points). Twenty normal elderly controls were also enrolled as a control group. Thirty sentences that contained novel similes (Items) were prepared. For each Item, four explanatory choices, consisting of one correct response and three foils, were provided. The participants were asked to choose the written statement that best represented the Item's meaning. In addition, all the subjects completed the Token Test.

RESULTS

The patients with mild AD had significantly lower scores than the normal controls on both the simile comprehension test and the Token Test. However, the patients with very mild AD exhibited significantly lower scores on the simile comprehension test, but not on the Token Test. The distributions of error types for the simile test differed between the mild AD group and the other groups. The mild AD patients made more errors that were "far" from the correct responses.

CONCLUSION

Patients with AD are more likely to have comprehension deficits of metaphorical expressions than comprehension deficits of non-metaphorical expressions. Pragmatic language dysfunction may precede formal language dysfunction during the progression of AD.

The importance of being apt: metaphor comprehension in Alzheimer's disease

We investigated the effect of aptness in the comprehension of copular metaphors (e.g., Lawyers are sharks) by Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients. Aptness is the extent to which the vehicle (e.g., shark) captures salient properties of the topic (e.g., lawyers). A group of AD patients provided interpretations for metaphors that varied both in aptness and familiarity. Compared to healthy controls, AD patients produced worse interpretations, but interpretation ability was related to a metaphor's aptness rather than to its familiarity level, and patients with superior abstraction ability produced better interpretations. Therefore, the ability to construct figurative interpretations for metaphors is not always diminished in AD patients nor is it dependent only on the novelty level of the expression. We show that Alzheimer's patients' capacity to build figurative interpretations for metaphors is related to both item variables, such as aptness, and participant variables, such as abstraction ability.