Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals

The comprehension of metaphors involves the ability to activate a broader, more flexible set of semantic associations in order to integrate the meanings of the weakly related parts of the metaphor into a meaningful linguistic expression. Previous findings point to a relation between levels of creativity and efficiency in processing metaphoric expressions, as measured by reaction times (RTs) and error rates. Furthermore, recent studies have found that more creative individuals exhibit a relatively more flexible semantic memory structure compared to less creative individuals, which may facilitate their comprehension of novel metaphors. In the present study, lower and higher creative individuals performed a semantic relatedness judgment task on word pairs. These word pairs comprised four types of semantic relations: novel metaphors, conventional metaphors, literal word pairs, and meaningless word pairs. We hypothesized that the two groups will perform similarly in comprehending the literal, unrelated, and the conventional metaphoric word pairs. However, with respect to novel metaphors, we predicted that higher creative individuals will demonstrate better performance compared to lower creative individuals, as indicated by smaller RTs and more accurate responses. Our main finding shows that higher creative individuals were faster in comprehending both types of metaphors, conventional and novel, compared to lower creative individuals. Furthermore, higher creative individuals were significantly more accurate than lower creative individual only in comprehending novel metaphors. The findings are discussed in light of previous findings regarding the relation between metaphor comprehension, semantic memory, and creativity.