Topic and Vehicle Play Different Roles in Processing of Metaphor: Activation and Inhibition of Semantic Features of Constituent Terms

This paper has examined the asymmetric roles of a topic and vehicle in the metaphor comprehension process. We began by proposing a perspective on the roles of topic and vehicle in terms of the sentence and discourse structure. According to this perspective, the topic, together with the preceding context, would convey information regarding the aspects of the topic that are relevant in creating a coherent interpretation of the metaphor with the entire discourse. In contrast, the vehicle would convey information regarding the types of objects or events it would represent. Thus, it is predicted that a prior presentation of a metaphor-relevant feature of the topic would facilitate the comprehension of the corresponding metaphor, while a metaphor-irrelevant feature of the vehicle would interfere with the comprehension. Two experiments were conducted in order to test these predictions, taking a priming paradigm similar to that of McGlone and Manfredi (2001). The obtained results were supportive of our proposal and suggested the importance of considering sentence and discourse structure to reveal the metaphor processing