Crossing the cultural bridge: The role of inhibitory control during second language metaphor comprehension

• Chen, Jiayan ^[1] ; Lv, Junmei ^[1] ; Chen, Baoguo ^[1]
  1. [1] Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 28, Nº 5, 2025, págs. 1393-1409
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1017/s1366728924001081
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Previous research has found that metaphor comprehension is often more challenging in L2 than in L1 because of the prioritization of literal meanings, but the effect of cross-cultural conceptual differences and the role of inhibitory control during L2 metaphor processing remain uninvestigated. We explored these through a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm (Experiment 1), a metaphor interpretation task (Experiment 2), and an eye-tracking reading task (Experiment 3) to evaluate competing theories. Inhibitory control did not play a significant role during reading culturally congruent metaphors as it did for culturally incongruent ones. However, interpreting both kinds of L2 metaphors involved more inhibitory control than literals, even after explicit explanatory contexts. Although literal meanings (and culturally incongruent L1 metaphorical meanings) of L2 metaphors may always be activated, inhibition involvement depends on both task requirements and metaphor properties. These can be explained by the extended graded salience view and the predictive processing framework.

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