Effects of Poetic Prosody on Metaphor Comprehension During Spoken Sentence Processing
Abstract
Metaphor comprehension may involve difficulties in its processing compared to when literal sentences are parsed. This is, for example, reflected in longer reaction. On the other hand metaphors appear prevalently within poetry. However, little is known about how prosody modulates metaphor comprehension. The present study investigates whether poetic prosody influences metaphor interference during the comprehension of spoken metaphors in Spanish. Sixty university students will listen to literal and metaphorical sentences produced with either poetic or neutral intonation. Participants will perform a literal truth-value judgment task, followed by a semantic plausibility rating and a free recall task. Reaction times and memory performance will be used as indices of cognitive load and depth of processing. We hypothesize that poetic prosody amplifies metaphor processing. This study aims to extend cognitive models of metaphor comprehension to the auditory domain and highlights the role of prosody in figurative language processing.