Violating Orientational Metaphors Slows Reading

Complementarity of Space and Time in Distance Representations

“…They found no evidence that readers use conceptual mappings to understand conventional temporal expressions, which indicates that people need not rely on conceptual mappings for conventional expressions, although such mappings may be used to understand novel metaphors. On the other hand, a study by Langston (2002) demonstrated that violating highly conventionalized orientational metaphors slows reading. Psycholinguistic and psychophysical studies investigating the spatial-temporal relationship from various perspectives are discussed in Sections 2.7 and 4.4. epistemologically equally plausible to assume that space and time are organized by a common set of parameters that are simply more transparent in spatial than in temporal language.…”

The comprehension of sentences involving quantity information affects responses on the up–down axis

“…If our proposal is correct, it should be possible to observe activation of this axis during the comprehension of language about increases or decreases in quantity. Langston (2002) demonstrated that sentences violating the more is up metaphor are harder to understand than sentences that fit the metaphor (e.g., Coke was placed above Sprite because it has less caffeine vs. Coke was placed below Sprite because it has less caffeine ). This observation supports the claim that spatial representations are active during the comprehension of language about quantity, but the lack of a spatial response during the experiment renders the result inconclusive as regards the nature of the representation activated during comprehension.…”

Metaphor in Formative Evaluation and Message Design: An Application to Relationships and Alcohol Use

“…For example, the first expression in the preceding examples is produced and understood using the unique mappings of RELATIONSHIP IS A TRAIN JOURNEY in addition to the ones in RELATIONSHIP IS A JOURNEY. Experimental evidence that conceptual metaphors are used in language processing has also been accumulating (Albritton, McKoon, & Gerrig, 1995;Gibbs, 1994;Langston, 2002). This research, covering a variety of experiential domains, has shown conceptual metaphors influence interpretation of metaphorical expressions and metaphor-based texts.…”