The influence of visual movement priming on novel and conventional metaphor comprehension: an eye-tracking study

Understanding metaphors is key to language processing. This research examined the influence of visual priming on action metaphor comprehension, addressing a critical gap in understanding cognitive mechanisms behind language comprehension. Based on the principles of embodied cognition, the research investigated how visual priming impacts comprehension of action metaphors, both novel and conventional, and literal action verbs. An experimental design was adopted, with eye-tracking technology used to capture eye movements as participants read metaphor-rich sentences. We executed a repeated measures ANOVA to analyze various eye movement metrics such as initial reading durations, the length of forward fixations, and the times spent on initial rereading. This was done to assess the influence of priming across varying categories of text. Results highlighted a significant effect of visual priming on first-pass reading times, especially for novel action metaphors, and forward-fixation and first-pass rereading times for all text types. The priming effects were confined to the target sentence. The study emphasized the facilitating role of visual priming in metaphor comprehension, hinting at the involvement of perceptual and sensorimotor systems in language comprehension. It also sets the stage for further research into the neural underpinnings of metaphor comprehension and broader priming modalities.