Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Metaphor comprehension is crucial for language understanding.
• The roles of metaphor familiarity and aptness in figurative meaning access are debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the comprehension of metaphors based on familiarity and aptness.
• To determine the locus of figurative meaning activation in metaphor processing.

Main Methods:

• A cross-modal priming paradigm was employed across five experiments.
• Metaphors varied in familiarity and rated aptness.
• Lexical priming using metaphor components (topic and vehicle) was assessed.

Main Results:

• High-familiar metaphors readily accessed figurative meanings.
• Low-familiar metaphors required high aptness ratings for figurative activation.
• Figurative activation was observed for most low-familiar, moderately apt metaphors.
• Neither metaphor components nor their lexical meanings primed the figurative target, indicating emergent property activation.

Conclusions:

• Metaphor comprehension involves activating emergent properties of the phrase, not solely lexical activation of individual words.
• Metaphor aptness significantly influences the processing of less familiar figurative language.
• The findings contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying metaphorical language processing.