Cross-cultural interpretation of filmic metaphors: A think-aloud experiment

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret cinematographic metaphors in a filmic advertisement. The study is organized in three parts: First, we offer a theoretical model that predicts the offline mental mechanisms that occur while people interpret filmic metaphors, based on an existing model of visual metaphor processing. Second, we evaluate the model in a think-aloud retrospective task. A TV-commercial is projected individually to 30 Spanish, 30 American, and 30 Persian participants, who are then asked to verbalize their thoughts. The commercial was previously segmented, analyzed using FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure), and marked for metaphoricity by two independent analysts. The collected data is then evaluated in two formal content analyses. In the first one, two independent coders classified all the clauses used by the 90 participants in relation to the steps outlined in the theoretical model. In the second analysis, those clauses in which the participants were constructing their metaphorical interpretation of the filmic advertisement were annotated for the type of metaphor they constructed. The general results show that: (1) some mental processes seem to be more prominent in some cultures and not in others, and (2) genre-related knowledge plays a crucial role in constructing filmic metaphors in certain cultures and not in others. With this study, we theoretically formalize and empirically test the types of operations reflected in the language that viewers use to describe how they interpret filmic metaphors, thus advancing the current theory and methods on filmic metaphor interpretation from cognitive, semiotic, and cross-cultural perspectives.