A Dataset of Metaphors from the Italian Literature: Exploring Psycholinguistic Variables and the Role of Context

Abstract

Defining the specific role of the factors that affect metaphor processing is a fundamental step for fully understanding figurative language comprehension, either in discourse and conversation or in reading poems and novels. This study extends the currently available materials on everyday metaphorical expressions by providing the first dataset of metaphors extracted from literary texts and scored for the major psycholinguistic variables, considering also the effect of context. A set of 115 Italian literary metaphors presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and a subset of 65 literary metaphors embedded in their original texts (Experiment 2) were rated on several dimensions (word and phrase frequency, readability, cloze probability, familiarity, concreteness, difficulty and meaningfulness). Overall, literary metaphors scored around medium-low values on all dimensions in both experiments. Collected data were subjected to correlation analysis, which showed the presence of a strong cluster of variables—mainly familiarity, difficulty, and meaningfulness—when literary metaphor were presented in isolation. A weaker cluster was observed when literary metaphors were presented in the original contexts, with familiarity no longer correlating with meaningfulness. Context manipulation influenced familiarity, concreteness and difficulty ratings, which were lower in context than out of context, while meaningfulness increased. Throughout the different dimensions, the literary context seems to promote a global interpretative activity that enhances the open-endedness of the metaphor as a semantic structure constantly open to all possible interpretations intended by the author and driven by the text. This dataset will be useful for the design of future experimental studies both on literary metaphor and on the role of context in figurative meaning, combining ecological validity and aesthetic aspects of language.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on metaphor comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: Do task properties matter?

“…The main implication of the findings of our study for future research on metaphor comprehension is that stimuli and tasks need to be created by carefully taking into account a range of characteristics, such as the linguistic properties and response format, whose role in modifying behavioral and neural responses is well known in the literature (e.g., Bambini et al, 2014;Schmidt & Seger, 2009). Furthermore, studies should consistently examine the role of task properties experimentally to investigate their relationships with the performance among individuals with ASD and those with TD.…”

“…As the task properties are often associated with changes in behavioral and neural response in processing metaphors, psycho-and neurolinguistic studies are increasingly based on extensive ratings of metaphor materials. To this end, norms have been established offering metaphorical expression characterizations along several linguistic dimensions, such as familiarity, interpretability, naturalness, and imageability (e.g., Bambini, Resta, & Grimaldi, 2014;Cardillo, Schmidt, Kranjec, & Chatterjee, 2010;Cardillo, Watson, & Chatterjee, 2017;Jacobs & Kinder, 2017). These linguistic dimensions, however, are much less established in the literature on metaphor comprehension in ASD.…”

Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study

“…Adding the ground resulted in higher cloze probability rates for metaphorical expressions in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1, as shown in the pre-test. Given that cloze probability is usually considered a measure of the degree to which the context establishes an expectation for a particular upcoming word (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011 ; Bambini et al, 2014 ), we can legitimately say that the two experiments vary with respect to contextual support, and it seems likely to assume that the different N400 response is specifically related to contextual expectations that guide lexical access and retrieval. When the ground is explicit in the context, as in Experiment 2, the retrieval of the metaphorically used words is less costly, as part of the concept is already activated.…”

“…Although these conclusions seem to capture what happens in the comprehension of metaphors in natural conversation, where the linguistic material often introduces and “primes” metaphorical meaning, they cannot be extended to all possible contexts. For metaphors taken from poetry, for instance, there is behavioral evidence that the literary text cannot be simply considered as a context licensing the figurative expression, but rather it seems to promote mechanisms that make the metaphor more open to different interpretations in different scenarios, less familiar but more meaningful (Bambini et al, 2014 ). Moreover, the modulation of familiarity might affect both the lexical retrieval and the pragmatic interpretation stage, which was not observed here given that all metaphors were non-lexicalized.…”

Creative Argumentation: When and Why People Commit the Metaphoric Fallacy

“…We tested conventional and novel metaphors along some major psycholinguistic variables ( Bambini et al, 2014 ): emotional (positive and negative) meaning , familiarity , meaningfulness (i.e., confidence in metaphor interpretation) and comprehension difficulty by using a 1 (very negative/very unfamiliar/very meaningless/very easy) to 5 (very positive/very familiar/very meaningful/very difficult) rating scale. We eliminated the metaphors with definite emotional meanings ( M positive meaning > 4; M negative meaning < 2), metaphors with insufficient meaningfulness ( M meaningfulness < 3) and metaphors that were too difficult to understand ( M comprehension difficulty > 4) (see Supplementary Table 3 ).…”