ABSTRACT

Metaphor is one instrument of communication that writers use to keep up their end of the bargain. Metaphor is often used to express ideas that are difficult to capture literally or to enliven prose that would otherwise be dull. If the elaboration engendered by use of metaphors takes extra processing capacity, then low span readers will be less able to make the necessary connections to support metaphoric facilitation. The metaphoric concluding statements and their literal counterparts were constructed to be equivalent summaries of the passages. If the metaphoric summaries were more memorable when in the context of the passage, then they would be expected to lead to better recall performance than their literal counterparts. If the metaphoric summaries are encouraging more relational processing by lower span readers, then the metaphoric advantage should be attenuated when testing depends on more proposition-specific information.