HKIER

Abstract

Twelve passages were written in Chinese as experimental texts. Each text contained two parts, a context and a concluding statement. Short contexts were derived from the long contexts, each preceding a concluding statement which induced literal or metaphorical interpretation. Subjects read the context and judged whether the concluding idea adequately described what the text led to. The design was a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial with reading ability, context length and literal/metaphor condition as the between-subjects factors. In terms of comprehension results, higher scores were obtained on the literal rather than the metaphor tasks, on the long rather than the short contexts, and by the good rather than the poor readers. An interaction effect between task type and context length was also significant, with the worst performance being observed in subjects in the short context, metaphor task condition. Regarding response latencies, there was a significant effect on context length, although not on task type or reading ability level. In general, these findings support the schema model in metaphoric processing.

摘要

本研究以十二篇中文文章作為測量工具。每篇分兩部份：內文及結論句。內文部份亦分長內文及短內文，而結論句分文意句和喻意句。受試者需讀內文，然後判斷結論句是否由內文意義引申而成。本研究為一 2 × 2 × 2 多元設計，以閱讀能力、內文長度、結論句性質為自變項，反應時間及答對率為隨變項。就答對率而言，文意句比喻意句成績較高；長內文比短內文較優；而高能力學生亦比低能力者優勝。文意或喻意與長文或短文兩變項相互影響，以短內文及喻意句的組別表現最差。就反應時間而言，長內文比短內文反應快，但結論句是文意或喻意，學生閱讀能力高或低均與反應速度無關。整體而言，文意與喻意認知影響答對率而不影響反應時間，這結果可支持智略認知的說法，該說法認為文意與喻意認知均是一階段完成，而喻意認知是無需兩階段認知來完成的。