Literary Metaphor Comprehension in the Rational and Experiential Cognitive Styles of Human Thinking

Abstract

Prior research on the poetic metaphor interpretation has focused on describing metaphoric structure and identifying its principles by observing semantically mapped properties of a metaphor. Cognitive literary studies have highlighted an experimental approach to the metaphoric thinking. The experimental approach examines, among others, the empirical processes of metaphor interpretation and comprehension. For metaphor processing, emergent meanings are crucial. We already have many reports, findings and normative data on metaphor processing, but individual cognitive mechanisms and variations across people have received an insufficient attention. To address this issue, this empirical study examines the influence of rational (analytical) and experiential (intuitive) cognitive styles on the comprehension of a poetic literary metaphor. In our statistical analysis, we have used a fractional pooling of the participants. It highlights the non-identical metaphor processes in rational and experiential cognitive preferences. According to our findings, people with a preference for the experiential cognitive style produce relatively more emergent metaphorical meanings than people with a preference for the rational cognitive style. These findings contribute to the more complex knowledge of the metaphoric thinking consequences. Keywords: Literary metaphor; Interpretation of metaphor; Rational (analytical) cognitive style; Experiential (intuitive) cognitive style; Emergent metaphorical meaning