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Metaphor-based schemas and text representations: making connections through conceptual metaphors
D W Allbritton1, G McKoon, R J Gerrig
1Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
Summary
Metaphor-based schemas aid text comprehension by facilitating sentence and word recognition. These findings suggest schemas link elements within mental text representations.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Schema Theory
Background:
- Text comprehension involves constructing mental representations.
- Schemas, or organized knowledge structures, are hypothesized to play a role in this process.
- Metaphorical language may activate specific types of schemas.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the function of metaphor-based schemas in text comprehension.
- To determine if these schemas influence how readers recognize information within a text.
- To explore the role of schemas in forming integrated text representations.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments were conducted to assess schema effects.
- Participants completed recognition tasks involving schema-related sentences and words.
- Textual context was manipulated to prime specific metaphor-based schemas.
Main Results:
- Schema-related sentences were recognized more accurately when schemas were activated (Experiment 1).
- Recognition of individual words related to activated schemas was also facilitated (Experiments 2-4).
- Evidence suggests metaphor-based schemas enhance the integration of textual information.
Conclusions:
- Metaphor-based schemas are actively used during text comprehension.
- These schemas facilitate the recognition of both sentence-level and word-level information.
- The findings support the role of metaphor-based schemas in creating cohesive mental representations of text.