Impact of Context Information on Metaphor Elaboration

In experiments by Gibbs, Kushner, and Mills (1991) , sentences were supposedly either authored by poets or by a computer. Gibbs et al. (1991) concluded from their results that the assumed source of the text influences speed of processing, with a higher speed for metaphorical sentences in the Poet condition. However, the dependent variables used (e.g., mean RTs) do not allow clear conclusions regarding processing speed. It is also possible that participants had prior biases before the presentation of the stimuli. We conducted a conceptual replication and applied the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to disentangle a possible effect on processing speed from a prior bias. Our results are in accordance with the interpretation by Gibbs et al. (1991) : The context information affected processing speed, not a priori decision settings. Additionally, analyses of model fit revealed that the diffusion model provided a good account of the data of this complex verbal task.