ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Can you mend a broken heart? Awakening conventional metaphors in the maze.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Metaphors in context and in isolation: Familiarity, aptness, concreteness, metaphoricity, and structure norms for 300 two-word expressions.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Bidirectional effects of speech and gesture: evidence from a novel levels-of-congruence paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Indeterminate and Enriched Propositions in Context Linger: Evidence From an Eye-Tracking False Memory Paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Conventional metaphors such as broken heart are interpreted rather fast and efficiently. This is because they might be stored as lexicalized, noncompositional expressions. If so, they require sense retrieval rather than sense creation. But can their literal meanings be recovered or "awakened"? We examined whether the literal meaning of a conventional metaphor could be triggered by a later cue. In a maze task, participants (N = 40) read sentences word by word (e.g., John is an early bird so he can . . .) and were presented with a two-word choice. Participants took longer and were less accurate when the correct word (attend) was paired with a literally-related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry). This suggests that the literal meaning of a conventional metaphor is not circumvented, nor that metaphors simply involve sense retrieval. The metaphor awakening effect suggests that the mechanisms employed to process conventional metaphors are dynamic with both metaphorical sense and literal meaning being available.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.