THE ROLE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING IN METAPHOR IDENTIFICATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING IN METAPHOR IDENTIFICATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Summary/Abstract: The paper endeavors to investigate the conceptual metaphor awareness via a psycholinguistic experiment done by Serbian grammar school and EFL students. The analysis is carried to determine the extent to which the students are aware of the differences between metaphor identification processes in the two languages and whether, in an attempt to offer satisfactory solutions, they resort to applying the mother tongue knowledge in case of not being able to interpret foreign language metaphors. The psycholinguistic experiment conducted in this research is composed of 28 metaphorical and non-metaphorical sentences in Serbian and English taken from the available corpora. The experiment was conducted by presenting the participants with equal stimuli,, where they were supposed to determine whether there is metaphorical content present in the sentences or not. In the final section of the research the results of the two analyses are compared to reveal that the assumptions we set off with were mostly correct. The obtained results suggested that language proficiency, the amount of exposure to L2 and direct formal instruction in various aspects of L2 are significant factors for fast and successful metaphor identification.

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