Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This project is intended to ascertain the role of conventionality in the use of metaphors in natural language processing. It examines the relationship between the degree of conventionality of a metaphor and the degree of difficulty in processing metaphorical meanings. The overall purpose is to obtain evidence regarding the metaphoric knowledge approach (Martin 1990) which asserts that the interpretation of novel metaphors can be accomplished through systematic extension, elaboration, and combination of knowledge about already well-understood metaphors. Subjects were tested on parsing sentences with different degrees of metaphorical novelty. Reaction times along with their responses were analyzed. The results suggest that a) degrees of conventionality in metaphorical use have a significant effect on the processing of the metaphor, b) degrees of novelty are proportionally related to the degrees of difficulty in processing, and c) conventional metaphors are as privileged in sentence processing as the "literal meaning" uses.