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Article published In: Corpus Approaches to Language, Thought and Communication
Edited by Wei-lun Lu, Naděžda Kudrnáčová and Laura A. Janda
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:1] 2019
► pp. 243–256

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Regular articles

The length of preceding context influences metonymy processing

Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

 | University of International Business and Economics
 | Beijing International Studies University
Published online: 20 August 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00033.che
Abstract
Earlier studies have shown that conceptually supportive context is an important factor in the comprehension of metaphors (Inhoff, A. W., Lima, S. D., & Carroll, P. J. (1984). Contextual effects on metaphor comprehension in reading. Memory & Cognition, 12(6), 558–567. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Ortony, A., Schallert, D. L., Reynolds, R. E., & Antos, S. J. (1978). Interpreting metaphors and idioms: Some effects of context on comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17(4), 465–477. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, little empirical evidence has been found so far regarding contextual effects on metonymy processing (Lowder, M. W., & Gordon, P. C. (2013). It’s hard to offend the college: Effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39(4), 993–1011.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Implementing an eye-tracking experiment with Chinese materials, this present paper investigated whether and how preceding contextual information affects the processing of metonymy. The results show that for unfamiliar metonymies, it takes readers longer time to interpret unfamiliar metonymies than to literally interpret them given a shorter context. However, the processing disparity between metonymic comprehension and literal comprehension disappears when longer supportive information is available in the preceding context. These results are analogous to those found for metaphors and familiar metonymies, supporting the parallel model of language processing. In addition, our results suggest that the presence of supportive preceding context facilitates the processing of unfamiliar metonymies more than it does to the literal controls.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Linguistic studies about the contextual influence on metonymy comprehension
    • 1.2Psychological studies on the contextual influence on metonymy processing
    • 1.3Research questions and hypotheses
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
    • 2.3Equipment and procedure
  • 3.Findings
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (26)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Chen, Xianglan, Hulin Ren & XiaoYing Yan
2022. Metonymy Processing in Chinese: A Linguistic Context-Sensitive Eye-Tracking Preliminary Study. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo

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