Educational Research Journal

Abstract

Twelve passages were written in Chinese as experimental texts. Each text contained two parts, a context and a concluding statement. Short contexts were derived from the long contexts, each preceding a concluding statement which induced literal or metaphorical interpretation. Subjects read the context and judged whether the concluding idea adequately described what the text led to. The design was a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial with reading ability, context length and literal/metaphor condition as the between-subjects factors. In terms of comprehension results, higher scores were obtained on the literal rather than the metaphor tasks, on the long rather than the short contexts, and by the good rather than the poor readers. An interaction effect between task type and context length was also significant, with the worst performance being observed in subjects in the short context, metaphor task condition. Regarding response latencies, there was a significant effect on context length, although not on task type or reading ability level. In general, these findings support the schema model in metaphoric processing.

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