| The five experiments reported here examine the interactive effects of a linguistic cue (metaphor) and an extralinguistic cue (interlocutor gender) in discourse tasks. In Experiment One, participants read portions of an online chat transcript and rated speakers on a number of personality-type dimensions. Speakers who used metaphor were perceived as more elaborative, more personal-focused, and more likely to be male. Participants also chose a metaphor as the next utterance of a speaker who used metaphor. In Experiment Two, longer transcripts were employed, and participants again evaluated speakers. Participants again identified speakers who used metaphor as more likely to be male and judged speakers employing metaphor to be more direct and more interesting. There were no significant communication problems identified when only one of the communicative dyad used metaphor (the other spoke literally). In Experiment Three, asynchronous communication (email) was used to prime the use of metaphor in participant responses experimentally. Content of the message was the same whether metaphor was used or not and participants responded with more metaphor to emails containing metaphor. This effect was stronger for males than it was for females. Participants perceived the confederate who sent the emails containing metaphor as more likely to be male (or masculine), as being more extraverted and interested in the conversation, and the emails as more elaborative and humorous. In a follow-up experiment a new group of participants rated the emails. Discriminant function analysis correctly re-assigned participants as male or female, and whether primed by metaphor or not with above chance accuracy. The final experiment, Experiment Five, used a synchronous communication medium (chat) to prime metaphor. Once again priming occurred, and again, the effect was greater for males. Moreover, the male confederate was judged more negatively when he used literal language than when he used metaphor. Taken together, this work demonstrates that use of metaphor in communication evokes both a metaphoric response by the interlocutor, especially for males, and impacts one's perceptions of the metaphor-user. More generally, these studies demonstrate the importance of conjointly considering both linguistic and extralinguistic cues and how they interact in everyday discourse comprehension and production.;Keywords. discourse processing, figurative language, sex differences, gender differences, metaphor, computer mediated communication, priming. |
