When sequence matters: the processing of contextually biased German verb–object metaphors

Abstract

Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential order for an under-studied type of construction: German verb–object metaphors. In two visual-world, eye-tracking experiments, we manipulated whether a discourse context biased a spoken target utterance toward a metaphoric or a literal interpretation. We also manipulated the order of verb and object in the target utterances (e.g., Stefan interviewt eine Hyäne, ‘Stefan interviews a hyena’, verb→object; and Stefan wird eine Hyäne interviewen, ‘Stefan will a hyena interview’, object→verb). Experiment 1 shows that contextual cues interacted with sequential order, mediating the processing of verb–object metaphors: When the context biased toward a metaphoric interpretation, participants readily understood the object metaphorically for the verb→object sequence, whereas they likely first understood it literally for the object→verb sequence. Crucially, no such effect of sequential order was found when context biased toward a literal interpretation. Experiment 2 suggests that differences in processing found in Experiment 1 were brought on by the interaction of discourse context and sequential order and not by sequential order alone. We propose ways in which existing theoretical views could be extended to account for these findings. Overall, our study shows the importance of context during figurative language comprehension and highlights the need to test the predictions of metaphor theories on non-English and non-nominal metaphors.

That kid is a grasshopper! Metaphor development from 3 to 9 years of age

“…Gaze behavior was analyzed using log-gaze probability ratios (Arai et al, 2007) of proportion of looks to metaphorical picture divided by the proportion of looks to the literal picture, as previously done in a similar experiment on adult metaphor comprehension (Ronderos et al, 2022). We analyzed log-gaze probabilities across two timewindows.…”

Suppression of literal meaning in single and extended metaphors

“…Examining a wide variety of cases, as argued by Holyoak and Stamenković (2018), is essential for assessing the robustness of a theory whose goal should be to account for the mechanisms behind metaphor processing independently of the morphosyntactic properties of the metaphoric vehicle. Steps have been taken in this direction, with various studies investigating the processing of non-nominal metaphors in recent years (e.g., Cardillo et al, 2012;Ronderos et al, 2021Ronderos et al, , 2022.…”