Date of Award
2007
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Program
Psychology
Supervisor
Dr. Albert Katz
Second Advisor
Dr. Debra Jared
Third Advisor
Dr. Marc Joanisse
Abstract
An experiment was conducted to examine the production of familiar proverbs following either a figurative discourse context or one of two literal contexts. Materials from Ferretti, Schwint and Katz (2007) were adapted for a cloze task. Data were collected for 42 proverbs from 240 participants. Booklets presented a series of context paragraphs each followed by a sentence stem of one to four words, which participants were asked to complete as they thought most appropriate. Item analysis revealed a higher percentage of target completions following a literal context containing content words of the target proverb, and with each succeeding word in the stem. An interaction was also observed whereby figurative completions, which were initially lower relative to literal completions, rose to comparable levels by the third word presented. Completions were correlated with ERP measures of the ease of comprehension reported by Ferretti et al. (2007). Findings are discussed in terms of predictions derived from models of comprehension and a constraint satisfaction approach.
Recommended Citation
McCormick, Sarah A. L., "CONTEXT EFFECTS IN THE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE" (2007). Digitized Theses. 4884.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4884