Publications

Publication details [#1140]

Guo, Xiuyan, Fengying Li, Zhiliang Yang and Zoltan Dienes. 2013. Bidirectional Transfer between Metaphorical related Domains in Implicit learning of Form-Meaning Connections. PLOS ONE 8 (7) : e68100.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
http://www.plosone.org/

Abstract

Working on the assumption that people can implicitly learn a connection between linguistic forms and meanings, for example between specific determiners (e.g. this, that…) and the type of nouns to which they apply, this paper aims to determine whether people transfer knowledge of form-meaning connections not only from a concrete domain to an abstract one, but also from an abstract domanin to to a concrete one, which is in line with the idirectional nature of metaphor representation. With a similar paradigm as used by Li et al, participants learnt form-meaning connections of different domains (concrete vs. abstract) and then were tested on two kinds of generalizations (same and different domain generalization). The findings show that transfer of form-meaning connections occurs bidirectionally when structural knowledge is unconscious. Moreover, more transfer occurs between metaphorically related domains when judgment knowledge was conscious (intuition) rather than unconscious (guess). Conscious and unconscious judgment knowledge may have different functional properties.