Abstract
In order for a person to comprehend metaphoric expressions, do metaphor-irrelevant aspects of literal information need to be inhibited? Previous research using sentence-verification paradigms has found that literal associates take longer to process after reading metaphorical sentences; however, it is problematic to infer inhibition from this research. Moreover, previous work has not distinguished between familiar and novel metaphor processing. To test more directly for when inhibition may be required during metaphor processing, we performed 3 experiments using a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm. Participants initially learned word pairs where the cues were potential metaphoric vehicles and the targets were literal associates (e.g., SHARK–swim). Then, participants read half the vehicles as part of metaphorical sentences, which they interpreted (The lawyer for the defense is a shark). Subsequent forgetting of the literal associates was greater when vehicles had appeared in metaphorical sentences (Experiment 1) and was observed for both familiar and novel metaphors when participants were instructed to interpret the metaphors (Experiment 2) but was observed for only novel metaphors when participants were instructed to simply read the metaphors (Experiment 3). These results suggest that forgetting occurs as a result of inhibitory mechanisms that are engaged to alter activation of irrelevant literal information during metaphor processing, and that these mechanisms are most relevant for the processing demands associated with novel metaphors.
Highlights
Figurative language may make discourse more interesting, but does it make comprehension more difficult? Many theories of discourse processing have suggested that figurative language involves additional processing compared with literal language (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Searle, 1979)
The finding that there is forgetting of literal associates of metaphoric vehicles as a result of generating their figurative interpretations is consistent with the notion that inhibition of literal information is involved in metaphor processing (Gernsbacher et al, 2001; Glucksberg et al, 2001)
These results show that a retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF)-based method may be useful for understanding when inhibition may be involved in metaphoric processing
Summary
Figurative language may make discourse more interesting, but does it make comprehension more difficult? Many theories of discourse processing have suggested that figurative language involves additional processing compared with literal language (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Searle, 1979). The words jail and job each have strong associates with other concepts, but are weakly related as a pair They clearly share the semantic feature of confinement, which can be seen as a way to resolve the semantic difficulty presented by this sentence. These accounts assume that metaphors are treated as similarity statements that highlight common properties between a topic and vehicle concept. A modified version of feature matching accounts was proposed by Ortony (1979) that focused on salience imbalance This account argues that the shared features will only be highlighted when they are of high salience for the vehicle concept, but of low salience for the topic concept. One issue with feature matching accounts is that there are often a number of common features between the vehicle and topic terms that are not relevant to the metaphoric interpretation. The view that metaphor processing is a matter of simple comparison cannot explain why the terms in a metaphor cannot be reversed (e.g., “my jail is a job”)
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