Spoken metaphor comprehension: Evaluation using the metaphor interference effect

ABSTRACT

The metaphor interference effect (MIE) is a response time phenomenon wherein judging whether metaphorical sentences are literally true or false takes significantly longer than judging control sentences, indicating simultaneous generation of literal and nonliteral meanings during the integration stage. For written metaphor comprehension, word interactions during early processing, the contribution of working memory and IQ, and processing in clinical populations have been evaluated using written MIE tasks. Despite metaphor prevalence in everyday conversation, however, research aimed at understanding the MIE with spoken stimuli is absent. Our study determined whether the MIE would be elicited for spoken stimuli and compared the spoken and written conditions. In line with our primary objective, we provided evidence, for the first time, of the MIE in the spoken modality. We also found differences between the size of the spoken and written MIE, and for scrambled metaphor sentences. Scrambled metaphor differences may indicate processing differences for spoken versus written meaningless sentences, but this requires further investigation. Results are discussed in the context of metaphor processing.

Notes

¹ To ensure that the SM difference was not simply a result of the between-subjects design of the current study, we ran a within-subjects pilot study to measure the extent to which the MIE was present in both modalities in a single population of individuals. Participants (N = 30) completed both the written and spoken tasks (with the stimuli divided equally among the two tasks so no sentences were repeated). The preliminary results replicated the findings reported in this article, with scrambled metaphors being judged more quickly than the metaphors in the written (78 ms) and spoken conditions (48 ms). The rank differences were also present in the pilot and similar to the between-subject study, with scrambled metaphors being as slow as literally false in the written condition, but being the fastest of the three false sentence types in the spoken condition (Appendix A). Ultimately, these findings need to be replicated on a larger scale (i.e., with increased stimuli and participants) to firmly test the robustness of these results.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from Autism Society of Edmonton and Area and the Autism Research Centre (ASEA/ARC) and from an internal grant at the University of Alberta as part of the first author’s Ph.D. dissertation. Brea Chouinard is a Killam Scholar and is further supported by a clinician fellowship with Alberta Innovates–Health Solutions and through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Autism Research Training program. Jacqueline Cummine is supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant. Joanne Volden is part of the CIHR Pathways team.