Salience and Context Effects: Two Are Better Than One

Peleg, Orna; Giora, Rachel; Fein, Ofer

doi:10.1080/10926488.2001.9678894

Cited by 85 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Another experiment in the same study established that this result was not an artifact of the different sentence structure of the two types of targets. A related result has been reported by Peleg, Giora, and Fein (2001): they show that at the beginning of the sentence metaphoric words may be processed as literals initially, whereas at the end their metaphoric meaning may be accessed immediately. Table 2 presents the reading times of the metaphoric targets in the two conditions from the first experiment in Gerrig and Healy (1983).…”

Section: Metaphor Comprehensionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…In the Gerrig and Healy's (1983) simulation we saw that INP predicts different reading time patterns for predicative and anaphoric metaphors, when compared with literals. The model predicts, as found by Onishi and Murphy (1993), Peleg et al (2001), Shinjo and Myers (1987) that predicative metaphors (e.g., D.G. Rossetti's metaphor A sonnet is a moment's monument) should not have much of an effect when compared with literals.…”

Section: Onishi and Murphy (1993): Anaphoric Versus Predicative Metapmentioning

confidence: 67%

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Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

Budiu¹

2004

Cognitive Science

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We present interpretation-based processing-a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account of the processing of literal sentences, metaphoric sentences, and sentences containing semantic illusions. It also explains how text can prime lexical access. We show that word literality is a matter of degree and that the speed and quality of comprehension depend both on how similar words are to their antecedents in the preceding text and how salient the sentence is with respect to the preceding text. Interpretation-based processing also reconciles superficially contradictory findings about the difference in processing times for metaphors and literals Ambiguity is one feature of human language that often frustrates the attempts to automatize its understanding by computers: not only can words have multiple meanings, but sometimes the meaning of a word is not taken at face value. Everyday language is often nonliteral; figurative devices such as irony, indirect request, metaphor, metonymy, or hyperbole are common and are understood easily. Metaphor is a particularly pervasive device: it is a rich source of new words (recent examples include web and couch potato) and, moreover, according to researchers such

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Section: Metaphor Comprehensionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Onishi and Murphy (1993): Anaphoric Versus Predicative Metapmentioning

confidence: 67%

Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

Budiu¹

2004

Cognitive Science

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“…Subjects’ judgments are likely to reflect lexical-pragmatic processes (i.e., adjustments of word meanings to make sense of the expression [80]) that are nevertheless very limited in inferring the intended message. Conversely, in the presence of context, judgments on the phrases are likely to reflect a mechanism that operates more globally [81], as context leads to the construction of situation models and wider interpretative scenarios [82]. Yet the literariness of the contexts employed here might induce global processes that differ from the elaboration of non-literary contexts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2014

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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.

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“…Based on this view, for example, participants immediately access the appropriate 'viewpoint' meaning when reading {The man tried to look at misfortunes in life from a different angle.}. More recently, a hybrid view represented by the graded salience hypothesis (Giora 2003;Peleg et al 2001Peleg et al , 2008 postulates, similarly to the modular view, two distinct mechanisms for lexical-and contextual-level processing. Unlike the modular view, however, it assumes that these two mechanisms run in parallel without initial interaction, and that lexical access is salience-based (i.e., ordered according to meaning dominance and not all at once; see Simpson & Burgess 1985).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conventionalization of Lexical Meanings and the Role of Metaphoricity: Processing of Metaphorical Polysemy Using a Cross-modal Lexical Priming Task

Chang¹,

Lin²,

Ahrens³

2015

Language and Linguistics

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3Decades of lexical ambiguity research has rigorously studied effects of relative sense frequency on sense disambiguation in biased contexts, while fundamental semantic issues such as distinction of different types of ambiguities, or influences from lexical meanings' semantic nature (e.g., literal or metaphorical) as well as these meanings' degrees of conventionalization, have received less attention. In particular, while previous experimental works tend to focus on stimuli having dominant concrete meanings, a large amount of words having dominant abstract meanings are overlooked. This study focused on lexemes that contain related literal and metaphorical senses (i.e., metaphorical polysemies) in Mandarin Chinese, and examined meaning activation patterns of literaldominant lexemes (having dominant literal senses and subordinate metaphorical senses, e.g., 廢物 fèiwù 'waste; a good-for-nothing') and metaphor-dominant lexemes (having dominant metaphorical senses and subordi nate literal senses, e.g., 角度 jiǎodù 'spatial angle; viewpoint') in literally-biased, metaphorically-biased, and control neutral contexts in an online cross-modal lexical priming task. While both senses of literal-dominant lexemes appeared to be accessed regardless of contextual bias, only metaphorical senses of metaphor-dominant lexemes showed signs of activation in compatible contexts. The results are discussed in terms of influences from different degrees of conventionalization of literal and metaphorical senses as well as time course of meaning activation for these two types of lexemes.

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Salience and Context Effects: Two Are Better Than One

Cited by 85 publications

References 0 publications

Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

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

Conventionalization of Lexical Meanings and the Role of Metaphoricity: Processing of Metaphorical Polysemy Using a Cross-modal Lexical Priming Task

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