Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphors suffuse language and affect how people think. Ameta-analysis of metaphor framing studies conducted between1983 and 2000 concluded that metaphors are about 6% morepersuasive than literal language (Sopory & Dillard, 2002).However, each of these studies was conducted in English withsamples drawn from populations of native English speakers.Here, we test whether and how language proficiency moderatesthe influence of metaphor frames. Sampling from a populationof non-native, but generally proficient English speakers fromIndia, we found that metaphor frames systematically affectedpeople who reported using English primarily in informal con-texts (i.e., among friends and family and through the media)but not those who reported using English primarily in formalcontexts (i.e., for school or work). We discuss the implica-tions of this finding for countries like the US, where Englishis increasingly a non-native language for its residents, and fortheories of language processing more generally.