EXPRESS: Controlled or automatic? Influence of congruency proportion and stimulus onset asynchrony on the brightness-valence and space-valence metaphoric congruency effects

Whether a cognitive process is operated automatically or in a controlled manner has been a long-standing question in cognitive psychology. However, this issue has not been investigated in the activation of metaphoric association. A primed word valence judgment task is often used to test the activation of metaphoric association, in which participants first see a prime (bright/dark square or fixation point moving up or down from the center of the screen) and then make a valence judgment to a target word. Metaphoric congruency effect occurs when participants make faster judgments to the target with valence being matched with the prime (good followed bright/top prime) than being mismatched with the prime (good followed dark/bottom prime). In the present two experiments, we manipulated prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and proportion of metaphorically congruent trials (congruency proportion) to tease apart the effects of automatic and controlled activation of brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric associations on word valence judgments. Results showed an overall effect of congruency proportion on brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric congruency effect, which was independent of prime-target SOA. The effect was enhanced or reversed when congruency proportion was higher or lower than 0.5, respectively, suggesting that the activation of metaphoric association could be modulated by strategic control. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and semantic priming theories are discussed.

EXPRESS: Individual Word Activation and Word Frequency Effects during the Processing of Opaque Idiomatic Expressions

Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activation of individual words during the processing of opaque idioms. In two primed word naming experiments, Dutch native speakers silently read sentences word by word and then named the last word of the sentence. This target word was embedded in either an idiomatic or a literal context, and was either expected/correct in this context (COR), or semantically related (REL) or unrelated (UNREL) to the expected word. The correct target word in the idiomatic context was always part of an opaque idiom. Faster naming latencies for the idiom-final noun than for the unrelated target in the idiomatic context indicated that the idiom was activated as a whole during processing. In addition, semantic facilitation was observed in the literal context (COR<REL<UNREL), but not in the idiomatic context (COR<REL=UNREL). This is evidence that the idiom-final noun was not activated at the meaning level of representation. However, an inhibitory effect of orthographic word frequency of the idiom-final noun indicated that the idiom-final noun was activated at the form level. These results provide evidence in favor of a hybrid model of idiom processing in which the individual words and the idiom as a whole interact on form and meaning levels of representation.