The Metaphor Awakening Effect: A Time-Course Investigation of the Literal Meaning during Metaphor Comprehension
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metaphors have been an object of fascination and a matter of debate since ancient times. What has attracted researchers is how metaphors are so seamlessly understood when their literal meaning differs from what they convey metaphorically. Some scholars have proposed that listeners attain the metaphorical content serially, where the literal interpretation is initially derived, combined with pragmatic information, and then the metaphorical content is determined. Other scholars, however, have argued that the efficiency with which metaphors are understood does not allow for the literal meaning to be derived first and then rejected in favour of the metaphorical content. Rather, they contend that most conventional metaphors are directly retrieved from semantic memory without the need for any inferential work. This thesis presents three manuscripts that investigated two-word metaphors such as broken heart and sharp tongue. The first manuscript reported a norming study to serve as an open source of materials required to run experiments such as those in the current thesis. The second manuscript examined whether the literal meaning of conventional metaphors was available, and could be recovered, immediately after the metaphorical content had been attained. In a maze task, participants read sentences word by word in a self-paced manner and then choose which of two words correctly continues the sentence, where the distractor words were either related or unrelated to the metaphorical content of the sentence. The results of this study yielded a significant awakening effect, whereby longer response times and lower accuracy rates were obtained in trials in which the literal meaning was cued immediately after the metaphor had been processed. This pattern of results suggests that the literal meaning was awakened during sentence processing. The third manuscript examined whether the awakening effect could be found further away from the metaphorical expression. The results of this study also yielded a significant awakening effect. However, it was weaker when compared to the original maze. Lastly, in Appendices A and B, the effects of familiarity and aptness on the awakening effect were analyzed. The results of these analyses indicated that, when the literal meaning is cued immediately after the metaphorical expression has been processed, familiarity and aptness do not have an overall effect. However, further downstream, the awakening effect is indeed modulated by familiarity and aptness. Altogether, the results from the series of studies presented in the current thesis provide compelling evidence in support of the literal-first approach.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".