Participants read either a metaphorical prime sentence, such as That defense lawyer is a shark, or they read a baseline-prime sentence. The baseline-prime sentence was literally meaningful in Experiment 1 (e.g., That large hammerhead is a shark), nonsensical in Experiment 2 (e.g., His English notebook is a shark), and unrelated in Experiment 3 (e.g., That new student is a clown). After reading the prime sentence, participants verified a target property statement. Verification latencies for property statements relevant to the superordinate category (e.g., Sharks are tenacious) were faster after participants read the metaphor-prime sentence than after they read the baseline-prime sentence, producing an enhancement effect. In contrast, verification latencies for property statements relevant to only the basic-level meaning of the vehicle and not the superordinate (e.g., Sharks are good swimmers), were slower following the metaphor-versus the baseline-prime sentence, producing a suppression effect. As Glucksberg and Keysar's (1990) class inclusion theory of metaphor predicts, the enhancement effect demonstrates that the vehicle of a metaphor stands for the superordinate category of the vehicle, and the suppression effect demonstrates that the metaphorical vehicle does not stand for its basic-level meaning.Language users experience little difficulty understanding a sentence such as Perjury is a boomerang, especially if they followed trials involving a perjured president. In contrast, theories of language have particular difficulty when it comes to explaining how language users understand metaphorical sentences. This difficulty stems from the traditional literal bias of theories of language.A literal interpretation of perjury is a boomerang would yield an anomaly, either on semantic or pragmatic grounds; perjury is not a boomerang, and attempting to categorize perjury into boomerang as one categorizes robins as birds results in a semantic anomaly or
Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers' access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a "cost") when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers' access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character's name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers' abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters.To successfully read and comprehend a story, readers must keep track of narrative details: Who is the main character? What does he or she look like? What is his or her role in the story? and so on. Moreover, most narratives are complex: they usually contain more than 1 episode, and more than one character participates in the events. The task of keeping track of
at the 35th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in St. Louis, Missouri. Experiment 5 was presented in April 1999 at the 71st annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago. We are grateful to David Gorfein and James Erickson for their helpful comments on the manuscript and to David Balota for raising the question that inspired Experiment 6.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.