Early Birds Can Fly: Awakening the Literal Meaning of Conventional Metaphors Further Downstream

IF 2.2 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Metaphor and Symbol Pub Date : 2023-09-29 DOI:10.1080/10926488.2023.2225561
Laura Pissani, Roberto G. de Almeida
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In two experiments also employing a maze task, we examined whether the awakening effect can be obtained when there is a medium (6 to 8 words) and a large (11 to 13 words) distance between the metaphor and lexical choice. Results indicated that the metaphor awakening effect persists but decreases as word distance increases. An analysis of our data based on a GPT model showed that our maze effects could not be attributed to target predictability. Overall, our results suggest that the literal meaning of a metaphor is accessed and remains available for about three seconds, fading as the sentence unfolds over time. The results support a model of metaphor comprehension that postulates the availability of both literal and metaphoric content in the course of sentence processing. AcknowledgmentsWe are indebted to Tobias Ungerer for his comments on section 5 and the calculation of the surprisal scores using the GPT-2 model, and to Cedric Le-Bouar for helping code the data. We thank Caitlyn Antal for her guidance on the statistical analyses for section 5. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of the present article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We note, however, that the present study was not designed to investigate the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff, Citation1993; Lakoff & Johnson, Citation1980), nor were our materials suited for such a task. Although some of the cues we employed may be taken as novel extensions of conventional metaphors, we cannot assert that (a) all of our cues are metaphorical extensions, as some may be literal cues. For instance, we anticipate that the literal meaning of cold feet can be triggered by the cue warm regardless of whether the latter is used metaphorically (e.g., warm welcome) or literally (e.g., warm weather). Nor can we assert that (b) all extensions belong to the same metaphor family, for we may not have the theoretical grounds to establish all cases in which a metaphor belongs to one or another metaphor family. For instance, it is not obvious whether warm blood, warm gesture, hot take, hot minute, cold glance, cold turkey, cool cat, and cool head belong to the same metaphor family.2 We employed a more conservative approach following Forster, Guerrera, and Elliot (Citation2009) procedures (i.e., removing RTs longer than 1500 ms and replacing remaining outliers per participants with 2 SD above the mean).3 A language model such as GPT−2 can perform language tasks such as reading comprehension, summarization, translation, and question answering. In addition, the GPT−2 model yields reliable estimates of cloze probabilities as it has been trained on approximately 8 M webpages to predict the next word given the previous ones (Radford et al., Citation2019). 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Abstract

ABSTRACTConventional metaphors such as early bird are interpreted rather fast and efficiently. This is so because they might be stored as lexicalized, non-compositional expressions. In a previous study, employing a maze task, we showed that, after reading metaphors (John is an early bird so he can …), participants took longer and were less accurate in selecting the appropriate word (attend) when it was paired with a literally-related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry). This suggests that the literal meaning of conventional metaphors is awakened or made available immediately after their metaphorical interpretation. But does the literal meaning remain available further downstream during sentence comprehension? In two experiments also employing a maze task, we examined whether the awakening effect can be obtained when there is a medium (6 to 8 words) and a large (11 to 13 words) distance between the metaphor and lexical choice. Results indicated that the metaphor awakening effect persists but decreases as word distance increases. An analysis of our data based on a GPT model showed that our maze effects could not be attributed to target predictability. Overall, our results suggest that the literal meaning of a metaphor is accessed and remains available for about three seconds, fading as the sentence unfolds over time. The results support a model of metaphor comprehension that postulates the availability of both literal and metaphoric content in the course of sentence processing. AcknowledgmentsWe are indebted to Tobias Ungerer for his comments on section 5 and the calculation of the surprisal scores using the GPT-2 model, and to Cedric Le-Bouar for helping code the data. We thank Caitlyn Antal for her guidance on the statistical analyses for section 5. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of the present article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We note, however, that the present study was not designed to investigate the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff, Citation1993; Lakoff & Johnson, Citation1980), nor were our materials suited for such a task. Although some of the cues we employed may be taken as novel extensions of conventional metaphors, we cannot assert that (a) all of our cues are metaphorical extensions, as some may be literal cues. For instance, we anticipate that the literal meaning of cold feet can be triggered by the cue warm regardless of whether the latter is used metaphorically (e.g., warm welcome) or literally (e.g., warm weather). Nor can we assert that (b) all extensions belong to the same metaphor family, for we may not have the theoretical grounds to establish all cases in which a metaphor belongs to one or another metaphor family. For instance, it is not obvious whether warm blood, warm gesture, hot take, hot minute, cold glance, cold turkey, cool cat, and cool head belong to the same metaphor family.2 We employed a more conservative approach following Forster, Guerrera, and Elliot (Citation2009) procedures (i.e., removing RTs longer than 1500 ms and replacing remaining outliers per participants with 2 SD above the mean).3 A language model such as GPT−2 can perform language tasks such as reading comprehension, summarization, translation, and question answering. In addition, the GPT−2 model yields reliable estimates of cloze probabilities as it has been trained on approximately 8 M webpages to predict the next word given the previous ones (Radford et al., Citation2019). To obtain our surprisal scores, we used the large version of the GPT−2 model, which contains 762 M parameters and 36 layers (Radford et al., Citation2019).4 We note that single-word recognition times are in the order of milliseconds, with some classical RSVP studies suggesting that, with about 60 ms of exposure, words can be recognized and integrated into an ongoing propositional representation of the sentence (see, e.g., Forster, Citation1970; Potter, Citation2018, for a review).Additional informationFundingThis research was supported by grants from the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to RGdA, and by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC) to LP.
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早起的鸟儿能飞:唤醒传统隐喻的字面意义
摘要“早起的鸟”等传统隐喻的解释相当快速和有效。这是因为它们可能被存储为词汇化的非组合表达式。在之前的一项研究中,我们使用了一个迷宫任务,我们发现,在阅读了隐喻(约翰是一只早起的鸟,所以他可以……)之后,当与字面上相关的干扰物(苍蝇)搭配在一起时,参与者在选择合适的单词(出席)时花费的时间更长,而且准确度更低(哭泣)。这表明,传统隐喻的字面意义在其隐喻解释之后立即被唤醒或可用。但是,在句子理解过程中,字面意义是否仍然存在?在两个同样采用迷宫任务的实验中,我们考察了隐喻和词汇选择之间存在中等(6至8个词)和较大(11至13个词)距离时是否会产生唤醒效应。结果表明,隐喻唤醒效应持续存在,但随着词距的增加而减弱。基于GPT模型的数据分析表明,我们的迷宫效应不能归因于目标的可预测性。总的来说,我们的研究结果表明,隐喻的字面意义是可以理解的,并且在大约三秒钟内保持可用,随着句子的展开而逐渐消失。研究结果支持隐喻理解模型,该模型假设在句子加工过程中字面和隐喻内容都是可用的。我们感谢Tobias Ungerer对第5节的评论以及使用GPT-2模型计算意外分数,并感谢Cedric Le-Bouar帮助编写数据代码。我们感谢Caitlyn Antal为第5节的统计分析提供的指导。我们也感谢两位匿名审稿人对本文早期版本的宝贵意见。披露声明作者未报告潜在的利益冲突。注1然而,我们注意到,本研究并不是为了研究概念隐喻理论而设计的(Lakoff, Citation1993;Lakoff & Johnson, Citation1980),我们的材料也不适合这样的任务。虽然我们使用的一些线索可以被视为传统隐喻的新延伸,但我们不能断言(a)我们所有的线索都是隐喻的延伸,因为有些线索可能是字面线索。例如,我们预计冷脚的字面意思可以由提示温暖触发,而不管后者是隐喻性的(例如,热烈的欢迎)还是字面上的(例如,温暖的天气)。我们也不能断言(b)所有的延伸都属于同一个隐喻族,因为我们可能没有理论依据来确定一个隐喻属于一个或另一个隐喻族的所有情况。例如,warm blood、warm gesture、hot take、hot minute、cold glance、cold turkey、cool cat和cool head是否属于同一个隐喻家族就不明显了我们采用了遵循Forster, Guerrera和Elliot (Citation2009)程序的更保守的方法(即,删除超过1500毫秒的RTs,并用高于平均值2个SD替换每个参与者的剩余异常值)3GPT−2等语言模型可以完成阅读理解、总结、翻译、问答等语言任务。此外,GPT - 2模型产生了对完形概率的可靠估计,因为它已经在大约800万个网页上进行了训练,以预测给定前一个单词的下一个单词(Radford et al., Citation2019)。为了获得我们的惊喜分数,我们使用了大版本的GPT−2模型,该模型包含762 M个参数和36层(Radford et al., Citation2019)我们注意到,单个单词的识别时间以毫秒为单位,一些经典的RSVP研究表明,大约60毫秒的暴露时间,单词就可以被识别并整合到句子的持续命题表示中(参见,例如,Forster, Citation1970;波特,引文2018,回顾)。本研究得到了美国国家科学与工程研究委员会(NSERC)和社会科学与人文研究委员会(SSHRC)对RGdA的资助,以及quacei - sociacei Culture基金会(FRQSC)对LP的博士奖学金的支持。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
2.90
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍: Metaphor and Symbol: A Quarterly Journal is an innovative, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of metaphor and other figurative devices in language (e.g., metonymy, irony) and other expressive forms (e.g., gesture and bodily actions, artworks, music, multimodal media). The journal is interested in original, empirical, and theoretical research that incorporates psychological experimental studies, linguistic and corpus linguistic studies, cross-cultural/linguistic comparisons, computational modeling, philosophical analyzes, and literary/artistic interpretations. A common theme connecting published work in the journal is the examination of the interface of figurative language and expression with cognitive, bodily, and cultural experience; hence, the journal''s international editorial board is composed of scholars and experts in the fields of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, literature, and media studies.
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