George Tim, Wiley Jennifer
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 Aug;42(8):1324-30. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000237. Epub 2016 Feb 4.
In order for a person to comprehend metaphoric expressions, do metaphor-irrelevant aspects of literal information need to be inhibited? Previous research using sentence-verification paradigms has found that literal associates take longer to process after reading metaphorical sentences; however, it is problematic to infer inhibition from this research. Moreover, previous work has not distinguished between familiar and novel metaphor processing. To test more directly for when inhibition may be required during metaphor processing, we performed 3 experiments using a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm. Participants initially learned word pairs where the cues were potential metaphoric vehicles and the targets were literal associates (e.g., ). Then, participants read half the vehicles as part of metaphorical sentences, which they interpreted (). Subsequent forgetting of the literal associates was greater when vehicles had appeared in metaphorical sentences (Experiment 1) and was observed for both familiar and novel metaphors when participants were instructed to interpret the metaphors (Experiment 2) but was observed for only novel metaphors when participants were instructed to simply read the metaphors (Experiment 3). These results suggest that forgetting occurs as a result of inhibitory mechanisms that are engaged to alter activation of irrelevant literal information during metaphor processing, and that these mechanisms are most relevant for the processing demands associated with novel metaphors.
为了让一个人理解隐喻表达，字面信息中与隐喻无关的方面是否需要被抑制？以往使用句子验证范式的研究发现，在阅读隐喻句子后，字面联想词的处理时间更长；然而，从这项研究中推断抑制作用存在问题。此外，以往的研究没有区分熟悉的隐喻和新颖的隐喻处理。为了更直接地测试在隐喻处理过程中何时可能需要抑制，我们使用隐喻诱导的词汇遗忘范式进行了3项实验。参与者最初学习词对，其中线索是潜在的隐喻载体，目标是字面联想词（例如）。然后，参与者将一半的载体作为隐喻句子的一部分进行阅读，并对其进行解释（）。当载体出现在隐喻句子中时，字面联想词随后的遗忘程度更大（实验1），当参与者被要求解释隐喻时，熟悉的隐喻和新颖的隐喻都出现了这种情况（实验2），但当参与者被要求简单阅读隐喻时，只在新颖的隐喻中出现了这种情况（实验3）。这些结果表明，遗忘是由于在隐喻处理过程中参与改变无关字面信息激活的抑制机制而发生的，并且这些机制与与新颖隐喻相关的处理需求最为相关。
