A psycholinguistic study on metaphor comprehension in a foreing language

Abstract

The present study deals with the understanding of metaphors by foreign language learners. Ten novel linguistic metaphors were selected from online editions of English and American newspapers. After that, we identified the underlying conceptual metaphor based on the conceptual metaphor inventory presented by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and the primary metaphor inventory proposed by Grady (1997). Considering the difficulties linguistic metaphors represent for text comprehension by non-native speakers, we seek to investigate what sort of knowledge foreign language learners use when trying to understand a linguistic metaphor. In this respect, we looked into the way foreign language learners comprehend (Littlemore, 2001, 2003) linguistic metaphors, firstly without using the context and then using the context. The sample comprised 221 Brazilian undergraduate students and 16 American undergraduate students at University of California, Santa Cruz. The results pointed out that conceptual metaphors related to the experiential domains of VISION, MOTION and ANGER received a higher score in the experiment carried out with the foreign language learners. The same metaphors have also been judged as the most common and the easiest to comprehend by the US-American native speakers who took part in the experiment. The comparison of the results of the studies carried out with Brazilian foreign language learners and US-American native speakers corroborate our hypothesis that there is a universal pattern in the structuring of abstract concepts which enhances the comprehension of metaphor in a foreign language in a similar way as it does in the mother tongue. In a nutshell, these results reveal that the comprehension process in both native and foreign language is strongly influenced by embodied cognition (Gibbs, 2006).