Contributions to the preparing of psycholinguistic tests: building a list of sentences

Abstract

This article describes two studies aiming at the assessment of psycholinguistic variables from a list of 135 sentences containing methaporical and non-metaphorical linguistic material. The notion of metaphor adopted here stems from the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically from the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (LAKOFF and JOHNSON, 1980). Study I (n=200) aims to inquire into the existence of a correlation between the conventionality of mappings involving primary conceptual metaphors and the familiarity of linguistic metaphorical expressions derived from these mappings. Study II (n=316) seeks to assess the degree of familiarity, arousal and valence of the sentences included in the list. These had their size and syntactic complexity previously controlled. Through the list of sentences elaborated here, this work aims to contribute to the development of psycholinguistic tests with metaphorical and non-metaphorical material involving the variables presented in the two studies. Thus, the results of the methodological precautions described in this article may be applied not only to studies in Linguistics, but also to studies dealing with the interface between language and other cognitive functions.