The Impact of Metaphorical Prime on Metaphor Comprehension Processes*

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the understanding of a metaphor is influenced by a metaphorical prime. Participants of the study were 30 undergraduate students of Chabahar Maritime University. An experiment was conducted in which the participants were expected to make judgements on the sensicality of 10 metaphors in two phases. In the no-prime condition, metaphors were not preceded by any prime. In the metaphor-prime condition, the same metaphors were preceded by metaphorical primes. Metaphors and metaphor primes were designed in a way that the nature of the relationship between topic and vehicle in each metaphor and its prime was similar, although there was no similarity between concrete features of the two metaphors. The results indicated that when a metaphor is preceded by a metaphorical prime, judgement on the sensicality of metaphor is faster and the metaphor is judged to be more sensical. Based on these results, it can be suggested that two superficially different metaphors might share a domain at a level beyond concrete features of topic and vehicle. In other words, the superficial or concrete features of topic and vehicle in metaphor prime, and its following metaphorical sentence, play no significant role in this respect. It is the activation of a shared domain in the metaphor prime that has a noticeable influence on the understanding of the following metaphorical sentence.