Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning

The past decade has witnessed the development of a significant body of research and theory concerning the areas of figurative language use and comprehension. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the broader implications of this research for contemporary cognitive psychology. The results of this examination reveal that cognitive psychology has dealt with figurative language as less important than literal language largely because of an implicit bias towards rationalistic philosophy and because of an unwillingness to deal with issues of ambiguity, novelty, beauty, and context; precisely those issues made salient by current research on figurative language.

Figurative language and cognitive psychology

Three experiments investigated the role of authorial intentions in metaphor comprehension. In these studies, subjects read metaphoric (e.g., "A family album is like a museum"), literal (e.g., "An art gallery is like a museum"), and anomalous (e.g., "A tortoise shell is like an art gallery") comparisons and rated their degree of meaningfulness (Experiment 1), made speeded decisions as to whether each phrase was meaningful or not (Experiment 2), or wrote out interpretations of each comparison statement (Experiment 3). The subjects were told that the comparisons were written either by famous 20th century poets or by a computer program that randomly generated the statements from a list of words. Our general hypothesis was that knowing that intentional agents (the poets) authored the different comparisons should facilitate subjects' comprehension of the metaphors. Experiment 1 showed that subjects rated both metaphoric and literal comparisons as being more meaningful in the poet condition than when these statements were supposedly written by computer. Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects were faster in making their meaningfulness judgments for metaphors in the poet condition than in the computer context, but that subjects were also slower in rejecting anomalous comparisons when these were supposedly written by the poets. Experiment 3 indicated that subjects produced more meanings or interpretations for comparisons presumably written by poets than by computer. These results highlight the importance of implied, authorial intentions in understanding metaphorical statements. We discuss the implications of this work for psycholinguistic theories of figurative language comprehension, as well as for theories of literary interpretation.

Authorial intentions and metaphor comprehension.

In order to determine whether mechanically generated sentences, often referred to in the literature as “anomalous,” are in fact anomalous, subjects in the present experiment were asked to do two different tasks: a paired-associates learning task involving anomalous sentences as responses, and a second task in which they were asked to interpret such sentences These tasks were counterbalanced across different groups of subjects Results of the interpretation task showed that a large proportion of subjects were able to give interpretations for anomalous sentences, while learning results indicated that anomalous sentences were more difficult to anticipate than natural sentencesonly when task order was Learn first, Interpret second In the order Interpret-Learn, differences in ease of learning between anomalous and naturally occurring sentences did not appear The results of this study demonstrate that anomalous sentences are interpretable, that a range of difficulty for such sentences can be established, that anomalous sentences are learned as easily as naturally occurring ones after interpretation, and that many of the interpretations given to such sentences are metaphoric in character These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of lexical organization

Danny D. Steinberg

Papers

Truth, Amphigory, and the Semantic Interpretation of Sentences.

Negation, analyticity, amphigory, and the semantic interpretation of sentences.

Natural class, complementary distribution, and speech perception.