Metaphor comprehension in L2: Meaning, images and emotions

Abstract

Non-linguistic components of metaphor understanding, emotions and mental images, have recently received attention within neurolinguistics and cognitive pragmatics, suggesting a role in differential representation and processing of language: metaphors are considered richer in affective connotations than their lexical or sentential non-emotional counterparts and images may be used in the recovery of propositional meaning. Assuming that the above characteristics of metaphors can trigger inferential processing, we explored the impact of their modulation on metaphor understanding in a second language (L2). We thus manipulated the nature of prime sentences in relation to the original target metaphors (e.g. Obama presided over a topic of discussion of epochal proportions) and created less emotional literal paraphrases (synonymous; historic proportions) which we compared against emotionally loaded counterparts (implicatures; amazing proportions), and examined the performance of seventy-four Greek-English bilinguals on a reading comprehension and a meaning-matching task. The results showed that both experimental conditions elicited fewer errors in comparison to the control condition but did not differ between them in accuracy or in reaction time (RT). We discuss these findings in view of the role of emotions and mental imagery in the understanding of metaphorical meaning, especially in the context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL).