An episodic memory experiment was conducted to examine whether “conceptual metaphors” influence how metaphorical expressions are processed and encoded into memory. Forty Chinese–English bilinguals read lists of expressions in their L1 and L2. The data revealed that after reading a series of metaphorical expressions based on the same underlying conceptual metaphor, participants falsely recognized new sentences that instantiated the same conceptual metaphor mapping more often than control sentences that did not share this mapping. This false memory effect was robust in both participants’ L1 and L2, with the only difference between languages being that participants showed more memory errors for literal sentences related to the source domain of the conceptual metaphors when reading in their second language (i.e., English). These data suggest that although bilinguals can access the appropriate conceptual metaphors in their second language, they have difficulty inhibiting literal meaning when processing metaphorical statements.

进行了情景记忆实验以检查“概念隐喻”是否影响隐喻表达如何被处理和编码到记忆中。四十名中英双语者阅读他们的 L1 和 L2 中的表达列表。数据显示，在阅读了一系列基于相同潜在概念隐喻的隐喻表达后，与不共享此映射的控制句子相比，参与者更容易错误地识别出实例化相同概念隐喻映射的新句子。这种错误记忆效应在参与者的 L1 和 L2 中都很明显，语言之间的唯一区别是参与者在用第二语言（即英语）阅读时对与概念隐喻的源域相关的字面句子表现出更多的记忆错误。 .