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

Abstract

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.