Metaphor Aptness And Conventionality: A Processing Fluency Account

Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence\u27s aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should

Productive Figurative Communication: Conventional Metaphors Facilitate The Comprehension Of Related Novel Metaphors

Three experiments explored whether conceptual mappings in conventional metaphors are productive, by testing whether the comprehension of novel metaphors was facilitated by first reading conceptually related conventional metaphors. The first experiment, a replication and extension of Keysar et al. [Keysar, B., Shen, Y., Glucksberg, S., Horton, W. (2000). Conventional language: How metaphorical is it? Journal of Memory and Language 43, 576–593] (Experiment 2), found no such facilitation; however, in the second experiment, upon re-designing and improving the stimulus materials, facilitation was demonstrated. In a final experiment, this facilitation was shown to be specific to the conceptual mappings involved. The authors argue that metaphor productivity provides a communicative advantage and that this may be sufficient to explain the clustering of metaphors into families noted by Lakoff and Johnson [Lakoff & Johnson, M. (1980a). The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4, 195–208]

Are Subjective Ratings Of Metaphors A Red Herring? The Big Two Dimensions Of Metaphoric Sentences

What makes some metaphors easier to understand than others? Several psycholinguistic dimensions have been identified as candidate answers to this question, including appeals to familiarity and aptness. One way to operationalize these dimensions is to collect ratings of them from naive participants. In this article, we question the construct validity of this approach. Do ratings of aptness actually reflect the aptness of the metaphors? Are ratings of aptness measuring something different from ratings of familiarity? With two experiments and an analysis of existing datasets, we argue that ratings of metaphoric sentences are confounded by how easily people are able to understand the sentences (processing fluency). In the experiments, a context manipulation was designed to affect how fluently people would process the metaphors. Experiment 1 confirmed that the manipulation affected how quickly people understood the sentences in a response time task. Experiment 2 revealed that the same manipulation influenced ratings of such dimensions as familiarity and aptness. Finally, factor analyses—on the ratings data from Experiment 2 and from several existing datasets—revealed two underlying sources of variance in sentence-level ratings of metaphors (the “big two” dimensions of metaphoric sentences): processing fluency and figurativeness. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of figurative-language processing by emphasizing more careful treatment of subjective ratings of metaphoric sentences, and by suggesting the use of alternative methods to manipulate and measure such dimensions as familiarity and aptness

Walking And The Role Of Speed In The Perception Of Time To Contact

Many analyses of time-to-contact (TTC) emphasize that retinal information, independent of distal distance and speed, is used to compute TTC (e.g., Tau). However, our research indicates that speed information is also used and that TTC judgments are influenced by extra-retinal self-motion information. A stereo HMD and a wide-area tracking system were used to present TTC stimuli in an immersive virtual environment. In Experiment 1, stimulus approach rate was independent of observer motion. TTC judgments were made by nine naïve observers, while walking and while standing, for object speeds that bracketed standard walking speed (∼ 0.5, 1, and 2 m/s). Displays lasted 3.5 s, with TTC varying from 4 to 6.5 s from onset. The visual environment was untextured, so that there was no visual information specifying the speed of self-motion. When standing, TTC judgments were fairly accurate (mean error = +169 ms), but were earlier for slow objects (49 ms) and later for fast (288 ms). This influence of object speed despite equivalence of Tau is consistent with a misperception of object speed (poorer speed differentiation than distance differentiation). When walking, all TTC estimates were earlier (M = −186 ms), and the differential between slow (−393 ms) and fast (25 ms) objects was increased (p \u3c .05). The increased effect of perceived object speed might be a consequence of a greater misperception of speed. Extra-retinal information specifying self-motion speed might substitute for object speed. In Experiment 2, we studied TTC judgments while walking toward objects whose position was defined in absolute space, so that true TTC was a collision between the motion of the object and the observer. Stimuli were matched in initial retinal angle and approximate TTC, and drifted at varying rates. TTC judgments were again underestimated in all cases, but the estimates were most variable when the ratio of object approach speed to walking speed was most extreme

The Wished-For Always Wins Until the Winner Was Inevitable All Along: Motivated Reasoning and Belief Bias Regulate Emotion During Elections

How do biases affect political information processing? A variant of the Wason selection task, which tests for confirmation bias, was used to characterize how the dynamics of the recent U.S. presidential election affected how people reasoned about political information. Participants were asked to evaluate pundit-style conditional claims like “The incumbent always wins in a year when unemployment drops” either immediately before or immediately after the 2012 presidential election. A three-way interaction between ideology, predicted winner (whether the proposition predicted that Obama or Romney would win), and the time of test indicated complex effects of bias on reasoning. Before the election, there was partial evidence of motivated reasoning—liberals performed especially well at looking for falsifying information when the pundit\u27s claim predicted Romney would win. After the election, once the outcome was known, there was evidence of a belief bias—people sought to falsify claims that were inconsistent with the real-world outcome rather than their ideology. These results suggest that people seek to implicitly regulate emotion when reasoning about political predictions. Before elections, people like to think their preferred candidate will win. After elections, people like to think the winner was inevitable all along