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Comprehending spoken metaphoric reference: a real-time analysis.

Mark T Stewart¹, Roberto R Heredia

¹Department of Psychology, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon 97301, USA. mstewart@willamette.edu

Experimental Psychology

|April 27, 2002

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Listeners comprehend spoken metaphors faster than literal language. This study used cross-modal lexical priming to show that understanding nonliteral meanings happens quickly, especially when the metaphor is first presented.

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics

Background:

Metaphorical language is common but harder to understand than literal language.
Previous research suggests slower comprehension for nonliteral meanings.
The time course of understanding spoken metaphors is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the time course of comprehending spoken metaphoric reference.
To compare the speed of metaphor comprehension versus literal language comprehension.
To explore the relationship between figurative descriptions and their referents in real-time.

Main Methods:

Utilized a naming version of the cross-modal lexical priming (CMLP) paradigm.
Presented auditory prime words (figurative or literal) and visual probe words.

Related Experiment Videos

Measured listener response times to probe words at different intervals after prime onset (prime offset and 1000 ms later).

Main Results:

Significant facilitatory priming was found for metaphorical interpretations at prime offset.
No priming was observed at the downstream (1000 ms) probe location.
Experiment 2 replicated findings at prime offset and showed no priming upstream.

Conclusions:

Listeners comprehend spoken metaphoric reference faster than literal reference.
The rapid comprehension of metaphor is closely linked to the prime offset.
Findings have implications for theories of metaphor comprehension and spoken language processing.