Keiko Nakamoto

• Bunkyo University

This study investigated the perceptual and cognitive characteristics of metaphoric and onomatopoeic descriptions of physical pain. Ninety-eight Japanese pain descriptors were identified from previous pain studies and the World Wide Web. Four hundred and thirty-six Japanese undergraduates were asked to indicate for each descriptor: (a) body location...

The purpose of this study was to directly investigate metaphor interpretation, which is thought to be diversified by the metaphor familiarity. Previous studies assessed interpretation process by investigating individual preferences for the form of the metaphor: “A is B” or “A is like B”. According to those studies, similarity is enhanced by metapho...

This study investigates the effects of action-sentence comprehension on the spatial judgment task. In the experiment, participants were asked to comprehend the meanings of action sentences involving upward, downward, or horizontal images and they were asked to identify a figure appearing either above or below a fixation cross presented at the cente...

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that people's preference of the word order of Japanese sentences correlates with meanings that cannot be reduced to meanings of head verbs. For this purpose, we conducted two experiments to compare two groups of sentences with different “supra-lexical” meanings (of “caused motion” and “caused possession”...

This research presents the data showing how effectively inter-sentential contexts determine the core meanings of lexical items, making itself a kind of precursor of the idea of now-famous "skip-grams".

This paper proposes and presents experimental evidence for a situationally based model of semantic interpretation that can reconcile the lexical meaning of a verb with the pattern of selectional restrictions shown by sentences in which the verb is used. We first show, using the results of a corpus-based analysis of the Japanese verb osou (attack, a...

Camac and Glucksberg reported there was no priming effect between constituent terms of a metaphor and argued that there was no prior similarity or association between the constituents. However, their study had several limitations. An important one was that they neglected the asymmetry of metaphor constituent terms. The purpose of this study is to r...

The purpose of this study was to provide experimental evidence for orientational metaphors based on the UP-DOWN image schema. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of the image schema on the picture-word comparison tasks. In the experiments, subjects were required to judge if the location of kanji-target matched the word printed at...

This article proposes a new method of analyzing metaphori- cal expressions from a linguistic perspective. By comparing a metaphorical text and its unmetaphorized version, we sug- gest that a small set of lexical differences can lead to totally different interpretations. The proposed method captures this phenomenon by 1) describing how phrases in a...