Does conventionality matter in metaphor understanding?

Sachie Maruyama, Linguistics

Metaphorical utterances differ in conventionality. Most language processing models do not address conventionality, with the exception of the graded salience hypothesis (Giora 1997, 1999, 2003, Giora and Fein 1997,1999), which predicts that sentences with conventional metaphorical meanings will be processed faster in metaphorical contexts than those with unconventional meanings. The current study tests whether or not conventional metaphorical expressions are processed faster than unconventional equivalents in metaphorical contexts.

    This study consists of a norming study followed by the main experiment. Based on thirteen well-known Conceptual Metaphors, twenty pairs of conventional and unconventional expressions were created, each with possible metaphorical and literal meanings. We prepared contexts for each pair of expressions in order to prompt either literal or metaphorical interpretations of the target sentence.
    The norming study is a rating task. Twenty subjects were asked to rate how well the last sentence of a four-sentence paragraph, being either  conventional or unconventional, fit the preceding context using a seven-point scale. This examines to what extent people are aware of conventionality.

    The main experiment is a self-paced reading task where the processing time of conventional and unconventional expressions in both metaphorical and literal contexts (the same four-sentence paragraphs in which the last sentence is the target sentence) is measured.

    The results indicate that sentences with metaphorical meanings are processed faster than those with unconventional meanings in metaphorical contexts. Moreover, sentences with metaphorical meanings are processed faster than those with unconventional meanings in literal contexts. These findings are consistent with the graded salience hypothesis.