Razumijevanje kreativnih metafora kod govornika engleskog kao stranog jezika

Most research on metaphor comprehension in second language (L2) speakers focuses on conventionalised expressions (e.g., Littlemore et al. 2011; Mashal et al. 2015), whereas L2 comprehension of novel metaphorical expressions has not been given much attention (Jankowiak et al., 2017). Th is paper inve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Suvremena lingvistika 2023-09, Vol.49 (95), p.109-130
Main Author: Werkmann Horvat, Ana
Format: Article
Language:hrv ; eng
Subjects:
engleski kao strani jezik
English as L2
Foreign languages learning
Language acquisition
metafore
metaphor comprehension
metaphors
Philology
razumijevanje metafora
Semantics
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Summary:Most research on metaphor comprehension in second language (L2) speakers focuses on conventionalised expressions (e.g., Littlemore et al. 2011; Mashal et al. 2015), whereas L2 comprehension of novel metaphorical expressions has not been given much attention (Jankowiak et al., 2017). Th is paper investigates the extent to which L2 speakers at different levels of proficiency differentiate between creative metaphors classified as easy and hard to comprehend. A self-paced reading task combined with sensicality judgements was used to test two groups of participants: L2 speakers of English with low/intermediate and advanced proficiency. Th e study examined reading times and answers to the sensicality judgements which inquired about whether the metaphors make sense. Th e results show that the advanced group of speakers more often judges that creative metaphors make sense, but in the case of reading time, proficiency has no significant effect on the understanding of different types of metaphors. Based on the absence of interaction between the groups and the type of metaphor, it can be concluded that the skills needed to understand the metaphor are partially transferred from the first language, however, the results of the sensicality judgments show that the advanced group judges significantly more that creative metaphors (regardless of difficulty) are meaningful. This indicates that with advanced knowledge of the language comes richer semantic representations, so advanced speakers more easily activate features of concepts that are otherwise more difficult to activate.
ISSN:0586-0296
1847-117X
DOI:10.22210/suvlin.2023.095.05