ABSTRACT

Mental imagery is frequently associated with metaphor. The low-imagery, high-comprehensibility category yielded the best peformance, while the high-imagery, high-comprehensibility category yielded the worst. The major finding of the studies reported so far is that neither imagery instructions nor high-imagery ratings help subjects much in recognizing the interpretations of proverbs. The dual-coding position has little to say that would predict the superior recall for the low-imagery, low-relationship proverbs, although it can accept such a finding—a single, verbal code can give memory performance superior to that with dual codes. Imagery could be a post-comprehension process regardless of sentence metaphoricity, but an image that was part of the comprehension process would presumably have a stronger effect on a memory code than would an image occurring later in time. Imagery becomes a tangential phenomenon or, at best, a process essential only at a shallow level of processing.