Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Competing accounts of metaphor processing makedifferentiating predictions regarding the role of a metaphor’selements: While some claim that the elements are role-neutral,others believe them to play different roles from the get-go. Wetested these predictions with an investigation of German verb-object metaphors such as Sebastian füttert eine Prinzessin(‘Sebastian feeds a princess’). Results are in line with accountsthat posit different roles for a metaphor’s elements.Additionally, we investigated the distinctive influence ofcontext and a verb’s selectional preferences when anticipatinga post-verbal object. The findings show that participantsanticipate an upcoming object less when these two factors clash(i.e., when context and a verb’s selectional preferences pointtowards different objects), compared to when they are aligned(i.e. when they point towards anticipating the same object).