Dynamics in metaphor comprehension [Elektronische Ressource] : a cross-cultural web-based experiment on understanding teacher metaphors / von Zhou, Dehui

Dehui

Sujets

• Psychologie

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• Publié par: universitat_duisburg-essen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 42
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

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Dynamics in Metaphor Comprehension

— A Cross-cultural Web-based Experiment on
Understanding Teacher Metaphors





Von der Fakultät für Ingenieurwissenschaften,
Abteilung für Informatik und Angewandte Kognitionswissenschaft,
Fachgebiet Allgemeine Psychologie: Kognition
an der
Universität Duisburg-Essen

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer
Doktorin der Philosophie (Dr. phil.)

genehmigte Dissertation




von
Zhou, Dehui
aus
Wuhan, China




Referent: Prof. Dr. Edgar Heineken
Koreferent: Drs. Rogier Crijns
Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 30.01.09
II
Acknowledgements

Through my five-year stay in Germany, I have not only acquired new knowledge in
applied cognitive psychology, but also earned precious experiences of living in a
foreign culture. It is with great joy and a sense of gratitude that I recall all those
people without whose friendly supports from various aspects I could not have started
and finished this dissertation.
The greatest credit should be granted to my thesis supervisor, Prof. Dr. Edgar
Heineken, who has not only offered me this precious opportunity to study in Germany
but also guided me throughout the whole empirical research and acquainted me with
Cowan’s working memory theory, which greatly inspired the formulation of the
dynamic view of metaphor comprehension. In addition, his generosity in furnishing
me an ideal working environment is much appreciated and his constant patient
guidance and valuable comments on my work are highly esteemed. I would like to
express my sincere thanks to Drs. Rogier Crijns at the Radbound University
Nijmegen, Holland for his valuable comments on this work. I want to thank Mr.
Carsten T. Vala for improving the English language in this work.
I am very grateful to Dr. Andreas Huber who fostered my interest in metaphor with
his own insightful research and literature that he shared with me. I feel indebted to
Mr. Guo Xu who used his experience in experimental design to benefit my research
at an embryonic stage.
For the successful implementations of the empirical work, high respect is
particularly due once again to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Heineken and my other dear
colleagues, Dipl. päd. Frank Schulte and Dr. Heike Ollesch. They have not only
developed the Lab. OR, the online experiment authoring system that greatly
facilitated the design, implementation, and data record of my own experimental
research, but also provided me constant supports whenever help was needed. My
thanks go especially to Mr. Schulte who patiently taught me how to carry out my
experiments at Lab. OR, acquainted me with relevant literature of online
psychological experiments, and helped me to solve the technical problems.
Moreover, I am also much obliged to the generous help of Dr. Yu Ding at Nanjing
Normal University, Ms. Liping Zhang at Jianghan University in China, Prof. Dr. Peter
Vogel and Ms. Simone Dulinski at the University of Dortmund, and Ms. Sabine
Kronemeyer at the University of Duisburg-Essen for helping me to recruit Chinese
III
and German participants. Of course, my sincere thanks are due to all the students
who participated in the experiments on a voluntary basis. Their friendly cooperation
and effort enabled me to attain reliable data sets for the research.
Gratitude should also be expressed to PD. Dr. Lothar Krempel, from whose
seminar on network analysis I have gained many insights and who also patiently
helped me to use the software Pajek to generate the bipartite network graphs, an
important aspect for the feature analysis of my experimental data.
Moreover, it is a great pleasure to acknowledge intellectual and emotional supports
from all my colleagues and my friends. I am grateful for sharing an office with my
colleague Ms. Cordula Yallaho, whose kindness and warmth always created a feeling
of home and eased my nerves when I worked at my dissertation. I would like to thank
my friend Christoph Noack and my colleague Julia Zimmerman for revising the
German version of the experimental text. I would like to thank Xia Wang and all
members of the Chinese Bible Group Duisburg for their constant prayers for me and
my family.
High respect is due to my loving father Jinhai Zhou and mother Zhaohua Zhang
whose great love and care have allowed me to grow up in a warm and supportive
family. I am greatly indebted to my sister Demei Zhou and my brother-in-law Bo
Xiong who took full responsibility to take care of my sick parents in China, which
enabled me to do years of research in Germany.
Much debt is owed to the spiritual and material support of my dear husband Mankit
Yau. It is his love, understanding, care and encouragement that made the hard work
of writing my dissertation more bearable. Also, I would like to thank my seven-year
old daughter Yuantian and my ten-month-old baby Kaying for the many sweet
moments that they have brought to me.
Above all, I am grateful that I came to know Jesus Christ in Germany. Through him,
I can pray to my heavenly father, the almighty God and seek for His support during
the whole process of my dissertation composition. From all my heart, I want to praise
His name for accompanying me in my emotional ups and downs, for promising me
hopes when no hope was foreseen, for providing me strength when I was weak, and
for loving me so much despite all my sins and faults.

IV
Abstract

This work is dedicated to exploring the process of metaphor comprehension.
There are a number of cognitive theories addressing this issue, including the
conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the salience imbalance
theory (Ortony, 1979), the structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1983), the domain-
interaction theory (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 1982), the attributive categorization
theory (Glucksberg and Keysar, 1990) and the conceptual blending theory
(Fauconnier and Turner, 1998, 2002). A critical review of these theories and their
supportive empirical studies have revealed that all of them are in a degree applicable
to explaining the comprehension of certain metaphors but not capable of working
with the processing of others. What are the major factors that drive different
mappings to be involved in processing different metaphors and affect the metaphor
comprehension? This is the major question to be investigated in this research.
Inspired by recent studies, a hypothesis is formulated: the cognitive processing
mechanisms in comprehending a metaphor are largely influenced by the addressees’
pre-existing conceptual knowledge as reflected in their estimation of the
conventionality and the aptness of the metaphor and the communicative context in
which the metaphor arises.
To test this hypothesis, a cross-cultural web-based experiment has been carried
out to explore how three metaphors are comprehended under various role-play
conditions by subjects whose pre-existing conceptual knowledge concerning these
metaphors varies from each other. The metaphor The teacher is a candle was
estimated by the Chinese subjects as the most conventional and apt teacher
metaphor but the German subjects estimated it as a less conventional and less apt
metaphor. The metaphor The teacher is a shepherd was estimated by the German
subjects as the most conventional and apt, but by the Chinese subjects as less
conventional and less apt. The metaphor The teacher is a captain was estimated by
both Chinese and German subjects as a less conventional but apt metaphor. Under
various role-play conditions (no role play, after the role play scenario with the positive
development or after the role play with the negative development), the Chinese and
the German participants were first asked to rate their affective impressions of the
teacher metaphors on dimensions of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) (Lang,
V
1980). Then they were required to rate how suitable thirty-three features selected
from a pilot study are in describing the teacher metaphors.
Altogether 180 complete valid data sets were collected from the participants from
two German universities and two Chinese universities. The multivariate analysis of
the SAM ratings and the cluster analysis and the network analysis of the feature
ratings are summarized as follows: First, a greater consensus in both the SAM
ratings and the feature ratings was shared among the subjects who regarded the
metaphor as conventional and apt than those who regarded it as unconventional and
inapt. Second, significant positive correlations between the topic and the vehicle
concept were found in subjects’ SAM and feature ratings of the metaphor that they
regarded as conventional and apt. In contrast, their SAM ratings and feature ratings
of the metaphor, which they regarded as unconventional and inapt, shows no positive
correlation between the topic and the vehicle of the metaphor. Instead, there was a
tendency of high rating emergent features. Third, context exerted significant influence
on subjects’ SAM and feature ratings. When the metaphor was provided in the role
play with the positive develo