It was noticeable in the study that there was an apparent difference between forwardmetaphors and reversed metaphors in terms of comprehension, indicating a preferred directionfor the comprehension of pictorial metaphors. This finding was in line with the study of Kressand Van Leeuwen[112], who proposed that pictorial metaphor could not be reversed due to adistinction between the “given” and the “new” images placed next to each other. This meantthat there was a visual grammar for comprehending pictorial metaphors.
However, it was also strongly shown in this study that there was reversibility for pictorialmetaphor comprehension. Compared to forward metaphor, the reversed metaphor wasprocessed for comprehension too, even though not completely. Both forward and reversedmetaphors were different from the baseline of literal true statement. This finding implies thatthey are both easier to be comprehended than scrambled metaphors and more difficult thanliteral true statements, which indicates that metaphorical understanding is possible in bothdirections for pictorial metaphors. And this is consistent with the claim of structural mappingtheory that metaphor comprehension involves two stages, including seeking commonalitiesand directional mapping[30-31][113-116]. According to structure-mapping theory, there are twostages during metaphor comprehension, and in the present study, we tested whether there is atendency of reversibility based on the time line. The study didn’t focus on the accurate timewhen the stage of commonality starts to shift to the directional stage, as Wolff and Gentnerdid[31]. They set two time points to test two different views of symmetric alignment anddirectional phase. This present study has proved that even at one single time point the resultscan still clearly show the two processes of metaphor comprehension, given both directionscan be processed by participants, and there is a striking difference for the comprehension ratebetween forward metaphors and reversed metaphors.
7. Conclusion
7.1 Major Findings
The most important contribution of the study is the finding that reversibility does exist inmetaphor comprehension, despite a difference of the comprehension between the reversed andforward metaphors, which means that reversibility only occurs conditionally. Compared withthe CMT claiming that the mapping between two domains in a metaphor is based on one-direction projection, this study points out that for pictorial metaphors the bidirectionalassociation between concepts from two domains may be the initial phase of metaphorformation and comprehension, preceding unidirectional projection. This temporal advantagecan be explained by the picture superiority effect that opens a wider and quicker possibility ofmetaphor interpretation. The syntactic marker used in the experiment may also account forthis result.
The second significance of this study lies in that it explored and verified threeinfluencing conditions. First, in terms of the relationship between the target and the source,the aptness of pictorial metaphor influences the reversibility. Pictorial metaphors of highaptness are easier to be comprehended and appreciated compared to those of low aptness. Inaddition, in the real advertising context, (a)symmetry considering how the target- sourceobjects are presented can lead to varied degrees of reversibility. Asymmetrical pictorialmetaphors are less reversible and easier to be processed. At last, from the perspective ofcontextual clues, verbally-presented features also play an important role in reversibility, withsource features and shared features having a more significant effect than target features.
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