Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals.

Yoed N Kenett,Rinat Gold,Miriam Faust

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00482

Yoed N Kenett, Rinat Gold + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00482

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Abstract

The comprehension of metaphors involves the ability to activate a broader, more flexible set of semantic associations in order to integrate the meanings of the weakly related parts of the metaphor into a meaningful linguistic expression. Previous findings point to a relation between levels of creativity and efficiency in processing metaphoric expressions, as measured by reaction times (RTs) and error rates. Furthermore, recent studies have found that more creative individuals exhibit a relatively more flexible semantic memory structure compared to less creative individuals, which may facilitate their comprehension of novel metaphors. In the present study, lower and higher creative individuals performed a semantic relatedness judgment task on word pairs. These word pairs comprised four types of semantic relations: novel metaphors, conventional metaphors, literal word pairs, and meaningless word pairs. We hypothesized that the two groups will perform similarly in comprehending the literal, unrelated, and the conventional metaphoric word pairs. However, with respect to novel metaphors, we predicted that higher creative individuals will demonstrate better performance compared to lower creative individuals, as indicated by smaller RTs and more accurate responses. Our main finding shows that higher creative individuals were faster in comprehending both types of metaphors, conventional and novel, compared to lower creative individuals. Furthermore, higher creative individuals were significantly more accurate than lower creative individual only in comprehending novel metaphors. The findings are discussed in light of previous findings regarding the relation between metaphor comprehension, semantic memory, and creativity.

Highlights

The creative processes involved in producing higher order linguistic outputs such as irony, humor, and metaphors include linguistic flexibility, fluency, and originality (Faust, 2012; Mirous and Beeman, 2012)
A group (LSC, high semantic creative (HSC)) X word-pair type (LP, conventional word pairs (CPs), novel word pairs (NPs), and UP) mixed-design ANOVA was conducted in order to examine the effect of word-type on participants’ comprehension of metaphors (CoM) reaction times (RTs) (Table 2 and Figure 1)
This analysis revealed a significant main effect of group, F(1,62) = 4.305, p = 0.042, η2 = 0.065. This main effect resulted from the HSC group having shorter RTs (M = 635 ms, SD = 253 ms) than the low semantic creative (LSC) group (M = 830 ms, SD = 466 ms) in the CoM task (p < 0.04)

Summary

Introduction

The creative processes involved in producing higher order linguistic outputs such as irony, humor, and metaphors include linguistic flexibility, fluency, and originality (Faust, 2012; Mirous and Beeman, 2012). Only a scarce amount of studies examined how individual differences in creative ability relate to processing high-order language products, like metaphors (e.g., Gold et al, 2011). This is the aim of the current study. The comprehension of conventional metaphors is based on the retrieval of the meaning of the metaphor, whereas the comprehension of novel metaphors is based on the creation of new meaning This difference between the processes involved in the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors is described in the career of metaphor hypothesis (Bowdle and Gentner, 2005). According to the career of metaphor model, as a novel metaphor becomes more conventionalized, its comprehension process shifts from a comparison process to a categorization process (Gentner and Bowdle, 2001)

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