The Impact of Metaphorical Prime on Metaphor Comprehension Processes^*

* The authors thank Kami (kombucha) Neira and Rosie Gronthos for proofreading the manuscript. FMR thanks Iryna Losyeva and Alexandra (mañuña) Marmolejo-Losyeva for their assistance.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the understanding of a metaphor is influenced by a metaphorical prime. Participants of the study were 30 undergraduate students of Chabahar Maritime University. An experiment was conducted in which the participants were expected to make judgements on the sensicality of 10 metaphors in two phases. In the no-prime condition, metaphors were not preceded by any prime. In the metaphor-prime condition, the same metaphors were preceded by metaphorical primes. Metaphors and metaphor primes were designed in a way that the nature of the relationship between topic and vehicle in each metaphor and its prime was similar, although there was no similarity between concrete features of the two metaphors. The results indicated that when a metaphor is preceded by a metaphorical prime, judgement on the sensicality of metaphor is faster and the metaphor is judged to be more sensical. Based on these results, it can be suggested that two superficially different metaphors might share a domain at a level beyond concrete features of topic and vehicle. In other words, the superficial or concrete features of topic and vehicle in metaphor prime, and its following metaphorical sentence, play no significant role in this respect. It is the activation of a shared domain in the metaphor prime that has a noticeable influence on the understanding of the following metaphorical sentence.

Keywords:

• Metaphor
• Metaphor Comprehension
• Topic
• Vehicle

Notes on Contributors

Omid Khatin-Zadeh is a visiting researcher at the University of Ottawa and a PhD candidate at Chabahar Maritime University. His research interests include metaphor comprehension, embodiment, mathematics understanding and neuropsychology. Email: [email protected]

Hooshang Khoshsima is an associate professor of TEFL at Chabahar Maritime University. His research interests include psycholinguistics and dynamic assessment. Email: [email protected]

Nahid Yarahmadzehi is an assistant professor of linguistics at Chabahar Maritime University. Her research interests include psycholinguistics and syntax. Email: [email protected]

Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos is a research fellow in human and artificial cognition at the Center for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L) at the University of South Australia. From November 2014 to December 2016, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University. His research interests include the embodiment of language and emotions, cross-modality, and statistics/methodology. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4680-1287

Notes

* The authors thank Kami (kombucha) Neira and Rosie Gronthos for proofreading the manuscript. FMR thanks Iryna Losyeva and Alexandra (mañuña) Marmolejo-Losyeva for their assistance.

1 A post-hoc analysis comparing the sensicality judgements between the prime and no-prime conditions was carried out. The result indicated that there was no difference between the proportion of judgements in the two conditions (V = 67.5, p ≈ 1). This suggests that the average proportion of participants judging the metaphors as sensical or non-sensical did not differ between the prime and no-prime conditions.

2 We thank one of the reviewers for pointing this out.