Wilson and Gibbs: "Real and Imagined Body Movement Primes Metaphor Comprehension" (2007)

One of the recurring problems with experimental tests of cognitive metaphor theory is that it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle lexical priming from semantic priming. For instance, the notion of dragging is not only semantically related to "boredom" and "delay," but also discursively related to it: About 4 out of the 10 results for dragging out in the BNC are time-related metaphors.

In an attempt to circumvent this problem, Nicole L. Wilson and Ray Gibbs have performed two experiments in which a non-verbal movement served as the prime for a reading task. Specifically, they had their subjects learn to make certain movements like a stretching motion on cue, and then had them read small phrases like stretch for understanding. It turns out that performing these actions decreases reading time.

Are the Clichés Really Clichés?

The phrases they used were the following (p. 725):

• Stamp out fear
• Push the argument
• Swallow your pride
• Sniff out the truth
• Spit out the facts
• Shake off a feeling
• Grasp a concept
• Chew on an idea
• Stretch for understanding

These phrases are not all equally standard. This is a bit problematic because Wilson and Gibbs explicitly use the data to argue against "phrasal lexicon" and "clichés or dead metaphors" accounts (p. 723). It would thus have been more convincing if they had used actual clichés instead of constructed and not completely natural phrases.

These differences can be quantified by counting co-occurrences. To do so, I've taken all the verb/noun pairs above and looked for cases in which they co-occur in the BNC.

For instance, I took all the forms of the verb shake (shake, shakes, shook, shaken) and paired them with all the forms of the noun feeling (feeling, feelings). I then checked whether any combination of a word form from the first list co-occurred with one from the second list up to 20 words apart, and in any order.

Compiling such counts gives the following table:

v	n	#(n)	#(v)	#(v, n)	P(n | v)	P(v | n)
grasp	concept	280	2485	8988	11.27%	3.12%
chew	idea	72	1116	31876	6.45%	0.23%
swallow	pride	112	2585	2913	4.33%	3.84%
sniff	truth	40	1165	8397	3.43%	0.48%
spit	fact	40	1371	41801	2.92%	0.10%
shake	feeling	228	9109	17559	2.50%	1.30%
stretch	understanding	40	6239	9552	0.64%	0.42%
push	argument	48	10703	12006	0.45%	0.40%
stamp	fear	8	3086	14578	0.26%	0.05%

So it turns out that we quite often grasp concepts, but we rarely if ever stamp out fear.

We should thus expect such a phrase to be experienced as much more "fresh," or alternatively, much more awkward. It would be interesting to check whether these statistics correlate in any way with the priming effect, but there's no way to do so directly, because Wilson and Gibbs do not report reading times for individual reading times in the experiment.