Modelling metaphorical meaning: A systematic test of the predication algorithm.

Metaphors, such as lawyers are sharks, are seemingly incomprehensible when reversed (i.e. sharks are lawyers). For this reason, Kintsch (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(2), 257-266, 2000) argued that computational models of metaphor processing need to account for the non-reversibility of metaphors, and demonstrated success with his computational model, the "predication algorithm," in simulating metaphor comprehension in a way that is consistent with human cognition. Predication is an ostensibly directional algorithm because its equation is asymmetric such that semantic properties of the vehicle (e.g., sharks) are added to the topic (e.g., lawyers) rather than vice versa. Although predication has been accepted as a viable algorithm for simulating metaphor processing, one of its core assumptions - that the semantic processing of metaphor is directional - has not been systematically tested, nor has it been systematically tested against multiple rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension. To that end, we tested the predication algorithm's performance and that of a set of rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension and distinguishing between canonical (e.g., lawyers are sharks) and reversed (e.g., sharks are lawyers) metaphors. Our findings indicate (1) the predication algorithm is comparable to simpler, rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension, and (2) despite the beliefs about the directionality of the predication algorithm, it produces surprisingly similar simulations for canonical metaphors and their topic-vehicle reversals. These findings argue against predication, at least as implemented in Kintsch's (2000) algorithm, as a viable model of metaphor processing. Implications for computational and psycholinguistic approaches to metaphor are discussed.

On choosing the vehicles of metaphors 2.0: the interactive effects of semantic neighborhood density and body-object interaction on metaphor production.

In a metaphor, such as language is a bridge, two distinct concepts known as the topic (i.e., language) and vehicle (i.e., bridge) are juxtaposed to produce figurative meaning. Previous work demonstrated that, when creating metaphors, participants choose vehicles that are concrete, rather than abstract, and are also a moderate semantic distance away from the topic. However, little is known about the semantic representations underlying metaphor production beyond topic-vehicle semantic distance and vehicle concreteness. Here, we studied the role of two semantic richness variables in metaphor production - semantic neighborhood density (SND), which measures the proximity of a word and its associations in semantic space, and body-object interaction (BOI), which reflects the ease with which a human body can motorically interact with a word's referent. In each trial, participants were presented with an abstract topic, such as miracle, and were instructed to make an apt and comprehensible metaphor by choosing a vehicle word (e.g., lighthouse). All of the topics were abstract but half were high-SND (from dense semantic neighborhoods) and half were low-SND (from sparse semantic neighborhoods). Similarly, half of the potential vehicle words were either high or low in SND and also differed on BOI such that half were high-BOI (e.g., bicycle), whereas half were low-BOI (e.g., rainbow). We observed a three-way interaction such that participants selected low-BOI, rather than high-BOI, vehicle words when topics or vehicles were high-SND. We interpret this finding to suggest that participants attempt to reduce the overall semantic richness of their created metaphors.

Conceptual metaphors influence memory automatically: Evidence from a divided attention false memory task.

Previous research has found that reading a list of ostensibly unrelated expressions based on the same underlying conceptual metaphor can evoke false recognition on a memory task for new expressions that use the same metaphor, the so-called conceptual metaphor false memory effect. We examined the automaticity of this effect by dividing participants' attention with a concurrent task. In Study 1, attention was manipulated while participants read the lists of expressions, whereas in Study 2, attention was manipulated both when they read the lists and when they were engaged in the later recognition memory test. Across both studies, the conceptual metaphor false memory effect was observed when conscious processing was limited by dividing attention. These data support the argument that conceptual metaphors are automatically activated when metaphorical expressions are read.

The RK processor: A program for analysing metaphor and word feature-listing data.

Feature-listing tasks are an invaluable resource for exploring how words, categories, and metaphors are represented. However, manually coding the generated features is time-consuming and expensive, and involves subjective judgments from the experimenter. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the "RK processor", a program that was developed in our lab to analyse metaphor feature data but which can also be applied to other feature-listing data. After detailing the steps of processing, we demonstrate that the processed feature data align with previous findings in which metaphor features were processed manually and that the processed features predict dimensions of metaphor judgments pertaining to comprehensibility and metaphor goodness. Lastly, we present several other applications for research on word similarity, compound words, categories and concepts, semantic ambiguity, incongruity resolution and computational modelling. The RK processor offers researchers a valuable tool to save time and resources and to maintain consistency in processing.

The psychology of saying what you don't mean: Celebrating the research career of Professor Albert Katz-A personal reflection.

Throughout his 45-year career, Professor Albert Katz (Department of Psychology, Western University) has tackled challeng ing aspects of human communication in a way that creatively merges the theoretical insights and empirical rigor of cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In this personal reflection, Professor Katz writes a short biographical piece on the life journey that led to his research programs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do metaphorical sharks bite? Simulation and abstraction in metaphor processing.

In a metaphor such as lawyers are sharks, the concept lawyers, which is the metaphor topic, and the concept sharks, which is the metaphor vehicle, interact to produce a figurative meaning such that lawyers are predatory. Some theorists argue that sensorimotor properties of the vehicle are the basis of metaphor comprehension. Accordingly, the metaphor lawyers are sharks is processed as a simulation in which bodily actions related to sharks are accessed (e.g., sharks chasing prey). In contrast, the long-standing assumption is that metaphors are processed as abstractions with no role played by sensorimotor properties. From this theoretical perspective, abstract characteristics of sharks (e.g., vicious, predatory) are argued to be the core properties involved in metaphor processing. Here, we juxtapose these two opposing views of metaphor processing using cross-modal lexical priming. We find evidence that low-familiar metaphors (e.g., highways are snakes) prime bodily-action associates (i.e., slither) but not abstraction associates (i.e., danger), and are hence processed via simulation, whereas high-familiar metaphors (e.g., lawyers are sharks) prime abstraction associates (i.e., killer) but not bodily-action associates (i.e., bite) and are therefore processed via abstraction. The results align with views of cognition and language that posit the presence of both embodied and abstract representations.

How discourse constraints influence neurolinguistic mechanisms during the comprehension of proverbs.

We use event-related brain potential (ERP) methodology to examine the influence of the linguistic markers literally speaking and figuratively speaking on the comprehension of proverbs (e.g., The cat is out of the bag). Our results show that slow cortical potentials at anterior electrode sites varied in amplitude across the proverbs as a function of the presence or absence of the markers, the presence and absence of discourse contexts, and the familiarity of the proverbs. The results demonstrate that the integration of literal meaning into context is easier than figurative meaning, and argues against models of figurative language processing that hold that comprehenders are obligated either to first process the literal or figurative sense of the trope.

Allan Urho Paivio (1925-2016).

Presents an obituary for Allan Urho Paivio, who passed away on June 19, 2016. One of his many accomplishments was the development of a dual-coding theory. Dual-coding theory, while very influential, has, unfortunately, been discussed all too often as a theory of mental imagery, and not within its larger context wherein mental imagery and verbal processes are separable but interconnected representational systems, an academic battle in clarification that Paivio waged much of his life. He published prodigiously, even in the decades after retirement. Among his many honors, he served as president of the Canadian Psychological Association (1975) and was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1978). (PsycINFO Database Record

The language used in describing autobiographical memories prompted by life period visually presented verbal cues, event-specific visually presented verbal cues and short musical clips of popular music.

Here, we examined linguistic differences in the reports of memories produced by three cueing methods. Two groups of young adults were cued visually either by words representing events or popular cultural phenomena that took place when they were 5, 10, or 16 years of age, or by words referencing a general lifetime period word cue directing them to that period in their life. A third group heard 30-second long musical clips of songs popular during the same three time periods. In each condition, participants typed a specific event memory evoked by the cue and these typed memories were subjected to analysis by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. Differences in the reports produced indicated that listening to music evoked memories embodied in motor-perceptual systems more so than memories evoked by our word-cueing conditions. Additionally, relative to music cues, lifetime period word cues produced memories with reliably more uses of personal pronouns, past tense terms, and negative emotions. The findings provide evidence for the embodiment of autobiographical memories, and how those differ when the cues emphasise different aspects of the encoded events.

Gender Differences in Being Thanked for Performing a Favor.

We examined gender differences in how one responds to being thanked for a favor. Using experimental passages, we manipulated who requested the favor and the manner in which the favor is asked. Male and female participants received a set of scenarios in which social status, gender and directness of the request were orthogonally varied. Although male and female participants had very similar perceptions of whether the favor was a command or not, male but not female participants, generated more accommodating and fewer non-accommodating acknowledgments when thanked. The effect was strongest when the request was made by a boss (relative to a peer), especially if the boss was male, and made the request in a direct manner. These data are consistent with the notion that, for males, more than so for females, interactions that make salient one's dominance status is relevant to gender-identity, and is linguistically reflected in a basic social exchange.

Metaphor creates intimacy and temporarily enhances theory of mind.

In 3 experiments we show that, relative to reading literal sentences, reading metaphor enhances performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), an instrument meant to measure first-order theory of mind. In each experiment participants read metaphorical or literal sentences in different contexts and afterwards completed an ostensibly unrelated task, the RMET. In Experiment 1, participants were presented metaphorical or literal sentences in short discourse contexts and were asked questions about the characters in the stories. We found that when one of the characters used metaphor, they were rated as having a closer relationship. A novel finding is that the degree to which the characters are perceived as being more intimate in the metaphor condition, the higher their scores on the RMET. In Experiment 2, participants created fictive contexts to prompting literal or metaphorical sentences. This writing task was followed by the RMET. Participants who created contexts for the metaphors scored significantly higher on the RMET. In Experiment 3, participants read metaphors or literal counterparts without any discourse contexts. Once again, participants scored higher on the RMET after reading metaphorical as opposed to literal sentences. Additional analyses across the 3 experiments revealed that metaphors but not literal counterparts were associated with fictive contexts that contained reference to mental states and idioms with emotional content (Experiment 2), were associated with a sense of intimacy between interlocutors (Experiment 1), the presence of affective words in the created context (Experiment 2), and association with a human agent when context was not presented (Experiment 3).

Gendered Language in Interactive Discourse.

Over two studies, we examined the nature of gendered language in interactive discourse. In the first study, we analyzed gendered language from a chat corpus to see whether tokens of gendered language proposed in the gender-as-culture hypothesis (Maltz and Borker in Language and social identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 196-216, 1982) can be found in interactive language. Of the eight tokens examined only three were found to differ in the hypothesized direction, and these only in male-male dyads. In the second study, we trained a male and a female confederate to use either male or female gendered tokens found to be reliable in Study One in their chats with participants. Our design permits disentangling of effects due to knowledge of the gender of the interlocutors and use of specific language tokens. We find that use of language tokens by the confederate promoted use of the same token by their interlocutor, regardless of knowledge of the confederate's gender. Moreover use of tokens consistent or inconsistent with visible gender influenced how the interlocutor perceived the confederate. Taken together these data are inconsistent with either the notion that gendered language is context independent (as suggested in the gender-as-culture hypothesis) or the notion that gendered language only emerges when gender is made salient, as would, in these studies, occur in mixed-gendered groups.

Mary j. Wright (1915-2014).

Mary J. Wright was the first female director of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA, 1959), its first female president (1968), and its first honorary president (1975). She was the first female chair of a major psychology department in Canada and a strong advocate for early childhood education. She was also an avid historian of psychology, which included the writing and editing, with her long-time friend Roger Myers, of the History of Academic Psychology in Canada (1982).

False recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm: The roles of gist and associative strength.

Theories of false memories, particularly in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, focus on word association strength and gist. Backward associative strength (BAS) is a strong predictor of false recall in this paradigm. However, other than being defined as a measure of association between studied list words and falsely recalled nonpresented critical words, there is little understanding of this variable. In Experiment 1, we used a knowledge-type taxonomy to classify the semantic relations in DRM stimuli. These knowledge types predicted false-recall probability, as well as BAS itself, with the most important being situation features, synonyms, and taxonomic relations. In three subsequent experiments, we demonstrated that lists composed solely of situation features can elicit a gist and produce false memories, particularly when monitoring processes are made more difficult. Our results identify the semantic factors that underlie BAS and suggest how considering semantic relations leads to a better understanding of gist formation.

Electrophysiological and behavioral measures of the influence of literal and figurative contextual constraints on proverb comprehension.

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.

Conformity in a generative linguistic task: the role of category and strategic nonword use.

Marsh, Ward, and Landau (1999) demonstrated that participants asked to create novel words use elements of sample nonwords they are given, even when instructed to avoid use of the examples. In four studies, we replicated the effect of conformity to sample nonwords and found the effect was not influenced by the semantic category of the words unless those words shared orthographic characteristics. We found that although we could increase conformity to examples when word exemplars were grouped by category, it was likely that much of this increase was strategically driven. We propose that the presence of the sample non-words, presented in groups with the same word rules, created an orthographic category used by participants in the word creation task.

Habitual acceptance of misinformation: examination of individual differences and source attributions.

This study identifies individuals who are habitually susceptible to accepting postevent misinformation across testing on three separate events. The results indicate that those individuals identified as habitually susceptible exhibited higher dissociation scores and less of an association between memory accuracy and confidence than did the individuals identified as nonhabitually susceptible. When they were asked to identify the source of the remembered information, similar patterns of source attributions were found for all individuals when they were responding correctly and incorrectly to nonmisinformation and when they were correctly rejecting items of misinformation. Importantly, from a source-monitoring perspective, individuals identified as habitually susceptible demonstrated a different pattern of source attributions than did those classified as nonhabitually susceptible when they were accepting misinformation. Habitually susceptible individuals were as likely to attribute the source of their memory incorrectly to something seen in the experienced event as to attribute it correctly to something read after the fact.