University of Genoa, Italy.
University of Genoa, Italy.
J Commun Disord. 2024 Sep-Oct;111:106448. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2024.106448. Epub 2024 Jun 26.
Previous research found metaphor impairments with dyslexia; however, it is unclear if difficulties are due to initial activation of the metaphorical meaning or to subsequent discourse integration processes. The study examines the presence of early automatic processing of metaphors in adults with developmental dyslexia, considering the role of executive functions and metaphor familiarity.
Using a sentence recall task and a semantic judgment task from the Metaphor Interference Effect (MIE) paradigm, we evaluated two early stages of metaphor comprehension, namely the generation of the figurative meaning and the suppression of the literal meaning. High and low familiar metaphors, and their scrambled counterparts, were aurally presented to participants, who were asked to judge whether sentences were literally true or literally false. Afterwards, they were provided ten minutes to recall the sentences they heard to verify the depth of processing for each type of stimulus. A total of 26 participants with dyslexia were included in the experimental group, and 31 in the control group.
Individuals with dyslexia showed a MIE and an accuracy rate that are similar to participants without dyslexia. Inhibition correlated with the MIE size only for high familiar metaphors, and working memory seemed to play no role in the process. In the recall task, both groups demonstrated a better encoding of the metaphorical sentences compared to scrambled metaphors, but participants with dyslexia recalled less metaphors than did the control group, showing that metaphors are no exception to the limitations in sentence retrieval typically found in dyslexia.
Our findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia are comparable to participants without dyslexia in their ability to automatically compute metaphorical meanings. Thus, difficulties in metaphor comprehension in people with dyslexia that have been detected in previous studies might depend on meaning construction in context rather than online semantic processing.
先前的研究发现阅读障碍存在隐喻障碍；然而，目前尚不清楚这些困难是由于隐喻意义的初始激活还是由于后续的话语整合过程引起的。本研究通过使用隐喻干扰效应（MIE）范式中的句子回忆任务和语义判断任务，考察了发展性阅读障碍成人中隐喻的早期自动加工的存在，同时考虑了执行功能和隐喻熟悉度的作用。
我们通过听觉呈现高熟悉度和低熟悉度的隐喻和其打乱顺序的句子，让参与者判断句子在字面意义上是否为真或为假。然后，他们有十分钟的时间回忆他们听到的句子，以验证每种类型刺激的加工深度。共有 26 名阅读障碍者被纳入实验组，31 名参与者被纳入对照组。
阅读障碍个体表现出与无阅读障碍个体相似的 MIE 和准确率。仅对于高熟悉度的隐喻，抑制与 MIE 大小相关，而工作记忆似乎在该过程中不起作用。在回忆任务中，两组都表现出对隐喻句子的更好编码，而不是打乱的隐喻句子，但阅读障碍组比对照组回忆的隐喻更少，这表明隐喻也不例外，在阅读障碍中，句子检索的局限性通常会导致对隐喻的回忆较少。
我们的发现表明，阅读障碍个体在自动计算隐喻意义的能力上与无阅读障碍个体相当。因此，先前研究中检测到的阅读障碍者在隐喻理解方面的困难可能取决于语境中的意义构建，而不是在线语义处理。
