Cognition Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Cognition, including details on psychology, neuroscience, memory, brain theory.

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

Ferretti TR, Schwint CA, Katz AN

Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue, Waterloo, Ont., Canada N2L 3C5. tferrett@WLU.ca

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.

Published 2 April 2007 in Brain Lang, 101(1): 38-49.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Cognition Research Today. All Rights Reserved.