Abstract
The idea that people can encode and use an extremely abstract and general form of a complex linguistic (proverb) input—a conceptual base—was examined in two experiments. In Experiment I, each proverb was accompanied by either a conceptually related (good, mediocre, or poor) or an unrelated interpretation. The related interpretations were more effective recall prompts than were the unrelated interpretations, but only for high-imagery proverbs. In Experiment II, subjects wrote interpretations of the proverbs and then received either the proverb subject-noun or a brief story as a prompt. As was the case for the interpretations in Experiment I, the stories did not share any major vocabulary or propositional structure with their proverb source. Nonetheless, the stories were as effective as the nouns. Also, quality of proverb interpretation and of recall performance were positively related, with the correlations involving low-imagery proverbs, and stories, tending to be higher. Both experiments provided support for the conceptual-base notion, and underlined the importance of interpretive context, but more definitive evidence is needed.
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Verbrugge, R. R., & McCarrell, N. S. The role of inference in the comprehension of metaphor. Paper presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, May 12, 1973.
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This research was supported, in part, by a grant from Albert Steiner to the University of Cincinnati, and by a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati to the first author.
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Honeck, R.P., Riechmann, P. & Hoffman, R.R. Semantic memory for metaphor: The conceptual base hypothesis. Memory & Cognition 3, 409–415 (1975). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212934
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212934