The Effect of Metaphor Familiarity on Semantic Activation of Topic and Vehicle

When we understand the metaphors, the metaphor vehicles enhance the metaphoric meanings, but suppress the literal meanings (Gernsbacher, Keyser, Robertson, & Werner, 2001). In this process, the familiarity of the metaphors is considered to have some effects. Blasko & Connine (1993) shows that the familiarity of metaphor reflects the activation of metaphoric meaning, and that high familiar metaphors activate its metaphor-related words, but low familiar ones does not. However, these studies show only the familiarity effect on the activation of the words related to the vehicles. In this research, we will investigate the familiarity effect on topic and vehicle comprehension related to the metaphors. Method Materials The materials were 16 Japanese metaphors (8 High familiar similes and 8 Low familiar similes). Procedure The experiment was consistent of two parts; Reading Task and Meaningfulness Decision Task (MDT; Iseki, 2003). In the Reading Task, the participants are required to read some sentences as possible as quickly. At the end of the task, the priming probes were presented in the form of complete or incomplete similes (e.g. Words are like Weapons / Words are like XXX). Immediately after the Reading Task finished, MDT started. In this task, the topic or the vehicle of the similes was presented as the subject (“Words / Weapons”) in 2000 msec. After that, the predicate was presented (“hurts someone.”), and the participants were required to decide whether the sentence composed by the subject and the predicate was meaningful or not in 2000 msec. Participants Forty-two Kyoto university students participated in the experiment. All were native Japanese speakers. In the MDT, twenty students participated in the condition of topic presentation, and the other twenty-two did in the condition of vehicle presentation