DOI 10.1515/langcog-2013-0024 Language and Cognition 2013; 5(4): 409 – 436 Nira Mashal The role of working memory in the comprehension of unfamiliar and familiar metaphors Abstract: Comprehension of unfamiliar metaphors (mercy blanket) is an efort- ful cognitive process that requires the formation of a novel metaphoric mapping between two disparate domains during which irrelevant properties have to be suppressed. The present study aims to examine the relationship between the comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors and working memory. Three experiments were conducted: a comprehension task (Experiment 1), a rec- ognition task (Experiments 2a and 2b), and a free recall task (Experiment 3). In the irst experiment comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors correlated with digit span backward but not with digit span forward. Results of the second experiment revealed that unfamiliar metaphors induced a higher rate of semantic errors relative to phonological errors, whereas familiar metaphors induced the same number of phonological and semantic errors. The third exper- iment conirmed that unfamiliar metaphors were harder to recall than were fa- miliar metaphors. These indings show that working memory capacity may be involved in the computation of unfamiliar metaphoric interpretations, and more speciically in the process of suppressing irrelevant information via the central executive. Familiar metaphor recognition may rely on either phonological codes that are maintained in the phonological loop or on semantic processing that in- volves long term storage. Keywords: unfamiliar metaphors, working memory, recognition Nira Mashal: Bar Ilan University, Israel. E-mail: nmashal2@gmail.com 1 Introduction Some evidence suggests that comprehension of metaphoric utterances is asso- ciated with eicient working memory. In order to understand a metaphoric sen- tence of the form A is a B, in which A represents the topic of the metaphor (target term) and B represents the vehicle of the metaphor (base term), the listener has to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (CS6) WDG (155×230mm) DGMetaScience J-2837 LangCog 5-4 pp. 409–436 LangCog_5-4_04-0024 (p. 409) PMU:(YCP)22/10/2013 29 October 2013 7:39 PM