How Gestural Representation of Metaphor Schema Facilitates Metaphor Comprehension in Congruent Gesture-Aligned Conditions: An Embodied Metaphor Processing Perspective

It has been argued that many metaphors are understood through the mapping of an image-schematic structure from the source onto the target. This image-schematic structure can be depicted by a gesture that is called gestural depiction of metaphor schema. In this study, we tried to find out how metaphor schema’s gestural depiction may affect metaphor comprehension. Three groups of participants made judgments on the acceptability of the same set of metaphors in three different conditions: congruent gesture-aligned conditions, incongruent gesture-aligned conditions, and no-gesture conditions. In congruent gesture-aligned conditions, metaphor schema, and the gesture accompanying the metaphor were congruent. In incongruent gesture-aligned conditions, metaphor schema, and the accompanying gesture were not congruent. Our findings showed that in congruent conditions, acceptability judgments were made in the shortest periods of time, and metaphorical sentences had the highest degrees of acceptability. In contrast, in incongruent gesture-aligned conditions, acceptability judgments were made in the longest periods of time, and metaphorical sentences had the lowest degrees of acceptability. Based on these results, we suggest that gestural depiction of metaphor schema activates the prominent property defining the metaphorical meaning and suppresses metaphorically-irrelevant properties. This impact is more significant when the key semantic property is spatial.