ABSTRACT

This study explored possible impairments in the comprehension of nominal metaphors in five aphasic patients with semantic deficits and two with difficulties in lexical access. To this end, a set of four novel tasks was designed: two oral paraphrasing and two forced-choice tasks. The results support the claims of the Class-Inclusion Model and the Graded Salience Hypothesis, and showed that difficulties in the comprehension of these types of expressions are sensitive to certain features of metaphor vehicles, especially their ambiguity, level of conventionality and degree of semantic opacity. Similarly, they confirmed that metaphors understood as categorization statements require the undamaged processing of low-imageability words, as opposed to analogical metaphors, which comply with the assumptions of the Structural Mapping Model. Generally, patients with lexical impairments do not show difficulties in the processing of metaphorical expressions, while the performance of patients with semantic deficit is affected in accordance with their inability to understand abstract and low-frequency words.

摘要

本研究探讨了五名有语义缺陷的失语症患者和两名词汇使用困难的患者在理解名义隐喻方面可能存在的障碍。为此，设计了一组四项新颖任务：两项口头释义和两项强制选择任务。结果支持类包含模型和分级显着性假设的主张，并表明理解这些类型的表达的困难对隐喻工具的某些特征很敏感，尤其是它们的歧义、约定俗成程度和语义不透明程度. 同样，他们证实，被理解为分类陈述的隐喻需要对低形象性词进行无损处理，而不是类比隐喻，后者符合结构映射模型的假设。一般来说，