LANGUAGE AND SPEECH, VoL 28, Part 2,1985 177

GETTING THE HANG OF AMERICAN SLANG:STUDIES ON UNDERSTANDING AND REMEMBERING

SLANG METAPHORS*

RAYMOND W. GIBBS, Jr. and ANNETTE NAGAOKAUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

Three experiments examined people's understanding and memory for slang metaphors.Experiment 1 showed that people processed slang metaphors, like He's on a trip (meaning"He's using drugs"), faster than they comprehended either literal uses of the same sentences,or non-slang equivalents, like He's using drugs. This suggests that slang metaphors can beunderstood without having to analyze the literal meanings of these expressions beforedetermining theii nonliteial interpretations. The results of Experiment 2 showed that slangmetaphors are recalled better than Uteral uses of the same expressions or non-slang equiva-lent utterances. This finding is consistent Mdth the notion that slang permits the speakerto convey both propositional information and his or her attitude toward that informationwhich makes slang particularly distinctive and memorable. Experiment 3 indicated thatslang prompts (e.g., "He's using drugs") facilitated recall of literal uses of expressionsconventionally viewed as slang (e.g.. He's on a trip, meaning "He's on vacation"), eventhough the slang prompt had nothing to do with the meaning of the literal utterance. Over-all, the results of these studies support the idea that the special pragmatic properties ofslang metaphors make these expressions easy to understand and remember.

INTRODUCTION

It is not hard to notice that people frequently use slang expressions in their everydayspeech. Among many segments of the American population we hear speakers refer totheir cars as lemons, the places where they live as their pads, and their drug experiences interms of their taking a trip. There are many reasons why slang expressions such as thesewould be preferred over more "literal" speech. The fact that most slang utterances haveobvious metaphorical origins suggests that in using slang a speaker intends to convey aresemblance of sorts between what is being said and what he or she really means. Thus,by saying I'm taking a trip to mean "I'm under the influence of drugs," the speakermakes references to the idea of going on a journey to express his or her experience inusing psychoactive drugs. However, slang metaphors, such as taking a trip, also refiect theefforts of speakers to be sociable to one another. A drug user could say that he or she wason drugs or under the influence of drugs, but this simply does not carry the socialevaluation with it as does the more colloquial phrase taking a trip. One view of slangmetaphors suggests that expressions like taking a trip or he eyeballed the data providea semi-private language by which speakers can explicitly affirm the special relationship

* This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz.

178 Slang Metaphor

that holds between themselves and their hearers (Nunberg, 1978; Spear, 1981).These observations suggest that slang metaphors have special pragmatic properties

associated with them, ones which could affect how people understand and rememberthese expressions. Our purpose in this paper is to report the results of three experimentsinvestigating comprehension and memory for slang metaphors. The basic thesis examinedhere is that the special pragmatic properties of slang should make these metaphoricalexpressions easy to understand and remember, especially since speakers frequently shareinformation about the conventional meanings of these utterances. This knowledge shouldpermit easy access to what a speaker intends by using a slang metaphor. At the same time,the special relationship between speakers and hearers invoked by the use of slang shouldmake these expressions particularly distinctive and memorable. For example, in manysituations slang serves to demarcate who is and who is not part of a particular socialgroup. Until recently, homosexuals remained so inconspicuous that they had difficultiesin detecting one another. A familiar game was to introduce in an otherwise normalconversation a single word or phrase that might seem innocent enought except to theinitiated, such as / went to a very lively and gay party last night. If that was greeted bywords from the same vocabulary, such as, I'm afraid the party I went to was a real drag;everyone acted like royalty, a contact was established. Two homosexuals could thusidentify themselves to one another in the middle of a heterosexual gathering (see White,1980).

There are also many slang expressions whose usage has become widespread throughoutthe American community. In using a common expression, like dope to refer to marijuana,a speaker invokes a background of beliefs associated with the word dope when it was usedin the 1930s to suggest the evil nature of marijuana (e.g., the movie Reefer Madnesswhich is a cult hit on many college campuses. See Nunberg, 1978, for further discussion).When using slang metaphors like these, speakers assume that hearers will be able to usethis background of knowledge in order to understand not only what is being referred to(i.e., marijuana), but also the social evaluation that accompanies use of such expressions(e.g., the ridiculousness of seeing marijuana as being terribly harmful). The use of slangmetaphors permits speakers to not only convey specific propositional information, butalso some indication of their attitude toward this information. Understanding whatspeakers mean by their use of slang metaphors requires that both kinds of information berecovered. It is in this sense that the comprehension of slang metaphors involves therecognition of their special pragmatic properties.

Although slang metaphors are quite common in casual speech, they have not beenthe focus of experimental investigation in psycholinguistics. There have, however, been anumber of related studies on how people understand and remember idioms andmetaphors. These studies have primarily looked at the role of literal meaning inunderstanding figurative utterances. One commonly accepted theory in linguistics andphilosophy, which we shall call the Standard Pragmatic Model, has proposed thatunderstanding nonliteral speech requires at least three distinct stages of processing. Thus,in comprehending a slang metaphor, such as He's on a trip (meaning "He's using 'njgs"),a hearer must (1) determine the literal meaning of the sentence, (2) compare th ' • ;almeaning with the context, (3) if the literal meaning is inappropriate, derive the c

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 179

meaning via a cooperative principle (Grice, 1975, 1978), or via the rules of speech acts(Searle, 1979).

Most experimental evidence indicates that people do not appear to understand non-literal speech in the manner suggested by this Standard Pragmatic Model. Gibbs (1980),for example, questioned whether people must first compute the literal meaning of anidiomatic expression before deriving its intended, nonliteral interpretation. In his study,subjects read and then verified paraphrases of idiomatic expressions, such as You can letthe cat out of the bag embedded within a story context. The results showed that subjectsactually took less time to understand and make paraphrase judgments for idiomaticuses of these expressions than for literal uses of the same sentences. If people alwayscompute literal meanings first, they should have taken longer to read nonUteral, idiomaticuses of expression, such as You can let the cat out of the bag (meaning "You can revealthe secret"), than to process literal uses of the same expressions (meaning "You canrelease the animal"). This clearly was not the case. Similar findings have been shown forunderstanding other kinds of nonliteral speech, like indirect requests (Gibbs, 1979,1983), metaphors (Harris, 1976; Glucksberg, Gildea and Bookin, 1982; Ortony, Schallert,Reynolds and Antos, 1978), and proverbs (Kemper, 1981).

One goal of the present studies was to extend these findings into the domain of slangmetaphors. In particular, we wanted to examine whether or not slang metaphors aresimilar to idiomatic expressions and metaphors in the way in which they are understoodand remembered. Our belief was that the special pragmatic properties associated withslang metaphors make them somewhat different from other kinds of nonliteral language.Specifically, the fact that slang invokes a high degree of intimacy between speaker andhearer via the recognition of the speaker's attitude toward the propositional informationmakes these utterances somewhat different from very conventional forms of language,like idioms, and quite different from more innovative speech, like novel metaphors.These differences between slang metaphors and other kinds of nonliteral discourse maybe reflected in the way people comprehend and remember slang expressions.

In Experiment 1 we examined the speed with which people comprehend slangmetaphors. Experiment 2 investigated memory for slang, and in Experiment 3 we lookedat the inferential processing that underlies comprehension of literal uses of slangexpressions.

EXPERIMENT l

In this study, subjects read stories, one line at a time, ending with a target sentence.Half of the time, the stories induced slang interpretations, and half of the time theyinduced literal meanings. For the slang contexts, the final sentences were either a slangmetaphor (e.g.. He's on a trip), or a non-slang equivalent (e.g.. He's using drugs). For theliteral contexts, the final sentences were either literal uses of the slang metaphors (e.g..He's on a trip) or literal equivalents (e.g.. He's on vacation). After reading the targetsentence in each story, subjects made a paraphrase judgment. The amount of time ittook subjects to read each line and to make the paraphrase judgments was measured.

180 Slang Metaphor

There were two alternative hypotheses considered. The Standard Pragmatic Modelwould predict that slang metaphors should take quite a bit longer to process than eitherliteral uses of the same sentences or slang-equivalent expressions. The extra time neededto process slang metaphors should be due to subjects' having to first analyze and thenreject the literal meanings of these utterances before deriving their intended slang inter-pretations. According to this model, then, the interpretation of slang metaphor is derivedfrom an initial analysis of the sentence's literal meaning. Comparing the reading-times tocomprehend and make paraphrase judgments for slang metaphors, literal uses of thesame expressions, and non-slang equivalent targets provides experimental tests of thishypothesis.

Our hypothesis differed from this. We expected that subjects should be able to under-stand slang metaphors directly without having to first analyze the putative literalmeanings of these expressions. This should be particularly so, given that slang metaphorshave strong nonliteral meanings conventionally associated with them. Consequently, wepredicted that subjects should actually take less time to read and make paraphrasejudgments for slang metaphors than for literal uses of the same expressions. We alsopredicted that slang metaphors should not take any longer to process than non-slangequivalent utterances.

These predictions differ somewhat from the findings of earlier work on understandingmetaphors (Harris, 1976; Ortony et al, 1978) which showed that metaphors do not takeany longer to process than literal statements, and in very short story contexts actuallytake longer to process than literal sentences (Ortony et al., 1978). However, the factthat slang metaphors, like He's on a trip, are conventionally viewed as having nonliteralmeanings suggests that subjects should actually take less time to read and makeparaphrase judgments for slang metaphors than for literal uses of the same expressionsor non-slang equivalent targets.

MethodSubjects. Thirty-six undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz

participated as subjects in order to fulfill a course requirement. All of the subjects werenative speakers of Enghsh.

Stimuli and design. Subjects were randomly assigned to read one of four sets of stories.Each set contained 24 stories, 12 of which appeared in Slang contexts and 12 in Literalones. For the Slang contexts, six of the stories ended in slang metaphors (e.g., / needsome bread), and six ended in non-slang equivalents (e.g., / need some money). For theLiteral contexts, six stories ended with literal utterances that were identical to the slangmetaphors used in the slang contexts, but this time having literal meanings (e.g., / needsome bread). Six other literal stories ended with statements that were literal equivalentsof the literal uses of slang (e.g., / need some toast). If a given story theme (e.g.. Money/Food) ended with a slang metaphor in Set A, it ended with a non-slang equivalent inSet B, a literal target in Set C, and a literal equivalent in Set D. Across the four sets ofstories there were equal numbers of subjects reading the four target types for each of the24 stories. The Appendix presents all of the slang targets used in Experiment 1. Table

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 181

TABLE 1

Story Contexts and their Conesponding Target Sentences

Slang Context

Scott was quite bored with college life.He called up a travel agency.He asked how much a trip to Europe would be.He was disappointed because it cost so much.He thought to himself,

"I need some bread." (Slang metaphor)

"I need some money." (Non-slang equivalent)

Literal Context

Scott was at a nice restaurant.The waitress had taken his order.He was waiting for his food to arrive.Scott was very hungry so he picked up his butter knife.He thought to himself,

"I need some bread." (Literal)

"I need some rolls." (Literal equivalent)

1 presents an example of the different story contexts and their respective targetsentences. All the slang metaphors were taken from Spear (1981).

All of the experimental stories were followed by a sentence which was intended tobe a true paraphrase of the target sentence. All the paraphrases for the different targetsentences were rated as being equally appropriate for their respective targets in a separaterating study completed by 19 undergraduate students. The paraphrases were included toinsure that subjects truly understood the meanings of the target sentences in theexperimental task. The time it took subjects to make the paraphrase judgments was alsoseen as another measure of comprehension for the target sentences.

182 Slang Metaphor

In addition to the 24 experimental stories, there were 12 stories that had targetsentences whose paraphrases were false. These filler stories were not included in the dataanalysis. Each subject, therefore, saw 36 stories in the session along with three practicestories: one with a slang target sentence, one with a literal target sentence, and one storywith a false paraphrase. Overall, the stories had a mean length of seven lines, targetsentences averaged a little less than four words in length, and the paraphrases slightlyless than four words. For a given stoiy context, all of the target sentences, and theircorresponding paraphrases, had the same number of words. Thus, any reading-timedifference between the target sentences and paraphrases can not be attributed todifferences in the length of the targets.

A rating study was performed to insure that the last lines of each story were inter-preted as they were intended to be. Twelve subjects participated in the study. For eachstory theme, three people saw the version ending with slang metaphors, three saw non-slang equivalents, three saw literal targets, and three saw stories ending with literalequivalents. Subjects were asked to judge whether the target sentence of every story wasto be interpreted nonliterally (i.e., slang) or literally. They were also asked to rate on afive-point scale the degree to which the target sentence was appropriate for its storycontext. Results showed that subjects correctly identified slang metaphors as having non-literal interpretations 93% of the time, and 90% of the time subjects agreed that the samestories induced literal interpretations of the non-slang equivalent targets. For the literalcontexts, subjects agreed 92% of the time that the literal uses of slang metaphors shouldhave literal interpretations and 96% of the time the literal equivalents should also haveliteral meanings. An analysis of the ratings showed no significant differences betweenthe overall effectiveness of the slang (4.21), non-slang (4.31), literal (4.15), and literalequivalent (4.35) stories in conveying the appropriate meanings of their target sentences.

Although the different story contexts equally induce the appropriate meanings of thetarget sentences, another possible bias merits consideration. It may well be that theslang contexts provide more constraints for the meanings of the targets than do the literalstories. Consider the examples shown in Table 1. The possible endings to the target/ need some in Table 1 may be over-determined in the slang context, given that"money" or "bread" seems to be a very probable answer. However, there may be morepossible endings for the same target in the literal context. To insure that the contextsdid not differ in this way, the following study was conducted. Twelve University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz undergraduates were presented with the story contexts used inExperiment 1. The presentation of the stories was counterbalanced so that six subjectsreceived the slang context for a given target and six, the literal story. The target thatfollowed each context had the last word omitted. The subjects' task was to read the storyand fill in what would be the most likely word used in that situation. If the slang contextconstrained the probable targets better than the literal stories, then, after reading theslang contexts, subjects should produce the conect word (e.g., bread) better than afterthe literal contexts. The results showed this not to be the case. Overall, subjects correctlyproduced the correct firlal word only 18% of the time after reading the slang contexts,but did so 27% of the time after reading the literal stories. This difference was notstatistically reliable. Consequently, it does not seem likely that there were any differences

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 183

in the story contexts in the way they constrained the possible words in the targets whichcould affect subjects' reading-times for the different targets.

Procedure. The stimuli were presented in a different random order for each subject ona computer terminal screen that was under the control of a PDP-11/23 computer. Thecomputer controlled the response keyboard and recorded the latencies of the compre-hension and paraphrase responses. Subjects sat at the keyboard and pushed a buttonto get the first sentence of the first story. Subjects read the sentence and pushed a buttonas soon as they understood what the sentences meant. When they gave their response, thefirst sentence was replaced by the second sentence of the story. Subjects read and gavea comprehension response for ^ach sentence of the story. After they gave the compre-hension response for the last sentence, which was the target, subjects heard a tone, anda possible paraphrase of the previous sentences appeared. The tone signified to thesubjects that they were to make a true-false paraphrase judgment on a designated part ofthe keyboard. After they had done this as quickly as possible, the trial was over. To getthe first sentence for the next trial, subjects could push the comprehension responsebutton. For both the comprehension response and the true—false paraphrase judgment,subjects were timed from the onset of the display to the instant the response button waspushed. The instructions emphasized that the subjects should try to understand exactlywhat each sentence said before they pushed the comprehension response button or thetrue—false paraphrase buttons.

Results and discussionOnly those targets that were followed by a correct paraphrase judgment were included

in the data analysis. Response times longer than 7 seconds (less than 2% of all responses)were eliminated from the analysis and were counted as errors. These outliers representedcases in which experimental instructions could not have been followed, as when subjects'attention wandered from the task. Means were calculated by averaging across subjects.Each of the analyses was performed twice: once treating subjects as a random factorwhile collapsing over sentences (Fl), and once treating sentences as the random factorwhile collapsing over subjects (F2).

Comprehension times for the target sentences. Table 2 presents the response times forunderstanding the target sentences. An analysis of variance revealed a significant effect ofContext (i.e.. Slang vs. Uteral), F l ( l , 35) = 5.09,p < O.O5;F2(1, 23) = 4.40, p < 0.05.The main effect of Target (i.e.. Slang vs. Equivalent Sentence) and the interaction ofContext and Target type were not significant. Further analysis on the individual meansusing Newman-Keuls tests showed that subjects took significantly less time to read slangtargets than literal uses of the same expressions (p < 0.05 across subjects and items).Subjects also took somewhat less time to process slang targets than non-slang sentences,but this difference was not statistically reliable.

One could argue that the reading-time advantage for the slang targets could be due tosubjects' being in a special "slang processing mode" since they were presented withmany slang expressions in the experiment. To check for this, we randomly matchedsubjects from the four experimental groups and analyzed the response times for the

184 Slang Metaphor

TABLE 2

Mean Response Times (msec) for Experiment 1

Sentence TypeSlang Non-slang Literal Literal

Equivalent

Target Sentences

Paraphrase Judgments

Combined

1280

1529

(.06)

2837

1309

1854

(.05)

3148

1364

2118

(.07)

3468

1439

2090

(.05)

3422

Note: Error rates appear in parentheses.

first occurrence of a slang metaphor in one group, with its matched, literal use in theother group. This analysis showed that subjects were faster overall in reading the slangtargets (1289 milliseconds as opposed to 1373 milliseconds to read the Uteral targets,^(35) = 2.02, p < 0.05). Thus, even before subjects could be put into a possible "slangmode of processing" there was a reaction-time advantage for the slang metaphors overliteral uses of the same expressions. These data also suggest that slang expressions are notrepresented in a different lexicon devoted especially to colloquial or slang expressionswhich is only examined after the literal analysis from the normal lexicon has been foundto be inappropriate (see Bobrow and Bell, 1973; Weinreich, 1967). Rather, it appearsthat slang metaphors are represented as part of the normal lexicon similar to the waysidioms are stored (see Gibbs, 1982,1984, for further discussion).

Another way of assessing the possibility that subjects were in a special "slangprocessing mode" was to ask them whether they were consciously aware (during theexperiment) of the presence of slang metaphors. This was done informally during thedebriefing after the experiment was completed. Only 11 out of 36 subjects admitted tosome awareness of the presence of slang metaphors at some point during the experiment.This also suggests that subjects were not simply in a special "slang processing mode" inthis study that would simply explain the experimental effects observed. Moreover,subjects' responses to the informal questioning also indicated that people did not thinkthere was anything unusual about reading these slang metaphors in a psychologicalexperiment.

Paraphrase judgments and error rates. Much work on sentence comprehension and use

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 185

has demonstrated the need to use some secondary task, like a sentence-verificationparadigm, to measure the comprehension criteria subjects use in understanding sentences.While the reaction times for the target sentences are a good indicator of understanding,it is also important to examine the reaction times for making the paraphrase judgments.

An analysis of variance on the time it took subjects to make the paraphrase judgmentsshowed a significant main effect of Context, F l ( l , 35) = 22.24, p < 0.0001 ;F2(1, 23)= 14.45, p < 0.0001; and a significant interaction between Context and Target TypeF l ( l , 35) = 11.95, p < 0.01; F2( l , 23) = 8.34, p < 0.01. Further examination of theindividual means indicated that subjects took much less time to make paraphrasejudgments for slang metaphors, than for either non-slang equivalents (p < 0.01 acrosssubjects and items), and literal uses of the same expressions (p < O.Ol across subjects anditems). An analysis of the error rates revealed no statistically reliable differences acrossthe different target types.

A more conservative measure of comprehension time for the target sentences is to addtogether the response time to make the paraphrase judgment and that to understand thepreceding target sentence. This measure is useful because a subject may push thecomprehension button for the target without fully understanding its meaning. If thesubject does understand the target sentence when he or she pushes the comprehensionbutton, then the subsequent paraphrase judgment should be made quickly. Adding theparaphrase judgment reaction time to that for the target sentence ensures a more accuratemeasure of comprehension. This seems particularly important, given that the slangmetaphors can severely deviate from their "literal" meanings.

This analysis revealed a significant effect of Context, F l ( l , 35) = 30.62,p < 0.0001;F2(l , 23) = 21.69, p < 0.0001; and a significant interaction between Context and Targettype, F l ( l , 3 5 ) = 11.04, p < 0.01; F2( l , 23) = 8.11, p < 0.01. Newman-Keuls tests,once again, showed that subjects were much faster at understanding and makingparaphrase judgments for slang metaphors than for non-slang equivalents (p < 0.01 acrosssubjects and items) and literal uses of the same sentences (p < 0.01 across subjects anditems).

The results of the first study, then, support the idea that slang metaphors do not takeany longer to process than literal uses of the same expressions or non-slang targets.Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that people were able to understand the slangtargets most quickly. As such, these data do not support the predictions of the StandardPragmatic Model of nonliteral language understanding and are most similar to the patternof results found for understanding idiomatic expressions (Gibbs, 1980). It appears thatpeople are able to easily comprehend the meanings of slang metaphors, because theseexpressions have strong conventional meanings associated with them which the speakerand hearer can readily assume. Moreover, the fact that literal sentences, such as Go cutthe grass, take significantly longer to understand and make paraphrase judgments forsuggests that subjects may have done some sort of "double-take" when encounteringthese sentences in literal contexts. That is, subjects may have automatically assumed theconventional, slang meanings of these sentences before figuring out that their literalmeanings were appropriate. This possibility is further explored in Experiments 2 and 3.

186 Slang Metaphor

EXPERIMENT 2

The results of Experiment 1 showed that people can easily understand the meaningsof slang metaphors without having to first process and reject their literal meanings.Literal uses of expressions conventionally used as slang take additional processing in orderto be comprehended. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to examine memory for slangmetaphors. In Experiment 2 subjects listened to a tape containing stories, with theirdifferent final target sentences, which had been used in the first study. After a five-minute delay, subjects were asked to recaU the last line of each story.

There are a number of hypotheses regarding memory for slang metaphor. The firstsuggests that slang shbuld not be remembered any better than literal sentences. Supportfor this possibility comes from Harris's (1979) study on memory for metaphors. Hefound no difference in either recall or recognition memory for metaphors (e.g., Jlie ivycuddled up to the window) and nonmetaphorical equivalents (e.g.. The ivy grew up tothe window). In another study, Harris, Lahey and Marsalek (1980) presented subjectswith poetic metaphors and paraphrases that expressed a similar meaning, but in a literalway. The results of recall and recognition memory task showed no evidence to suggestthat metaphors are especially memorable, especially evocative of vivid images orespecially difficult to understand. This pattern of results seemed to hold when themetaphors were presented in a dramatic context. The results of these studies suggest,then, that slang metaphors should not be more memorable than non-slang equivalentutterances or literal targets.

Another possibility suggests that slang metaphors should not be recalled as often asliteral uses of the same expressions, since people process the literal uses to a greaterdegree or depth (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) as evident from the additional reading timeneeded to interpret literal targets as shown in Experiment 1. Similar to the findings ofGibbs (1980), where subjects recalled literal uses of idioms more often than conventional,idiomatic uses, subjects in the present study could recaU literal uses of slang metaphorsbest because of the "double-take" reaction subjects experience when they hear literaluses of the slang targets. Thus, when subjects first hear literal uses of slang metaphors(e.g.,He's on a trip literally meaning "He's on vacation"), they automatically see the non-Uteral, slang meaning before deciding that the literal interpretation is appropriate. This"double-take" reaction makes literal uses of slang more distinctive, which consequentlycould be more memorable than slang metaphors.

On the other hand, Craik and Tulving (1975) have presented evidence that speed ofprocessing does not necessarily affect memory for verbal material. As such, it is possiblethat slang metaphors could be remembered well despite the fact that these utterancesseem to be understood rather quickly, as shown by the results of Experiment 1. Analternative idea that supports this possibility comes from an examination of the pragmaticproperties of slang metaphors. Some investigators have noted that people tend toremember the surface forms of utterances that personally involve the speaker and hearerto a large degree. In 'an important study, Keenan, MacWhinney and Mayhew (1977)distinguished between sentences with low interactional content (e.g., / think there aretwo fundamental tasks in this study) and high interactional content {t.g., I think you've

R. W, Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 187

made a fundamental error in this study). The results of Keenan et al. (1977) showedthat the surface forms of sentences with high interactional content were recognized betterthan were the surface forms of statements with low interactional content. Thus, peopletend to best remember utterances in conversation that interpersonally involve the speakerand hearer to a large degree. Slang metaphors may also be considered as utterances withhigh interactional content. Speakers often identify with each other by the vocabularyused, and slang conveys the suggestion that the speaker and hearer enjoy a specialfraternity (Nunberg, 1978; Spear, 1981). This suggests that slang may be especiallymemorable since it relates the speaker and hearer in this special way by conveying thespeaker's attitude toward the feferent of his or her utterance. Other research alsosupports the idea that people should be particularly good at remembering the surfaceforms of utterances that play an important pragmatic function in conversation (Bates,Masling and Kintsch, 1978; Bates, Kintsch, Fletcher and Guiliani, 1980; Gibbs, 1981).If slang metaphors serve special pragmatic purposes by conveying the speaker's attitudetoward his or her utterance, then subjects should recall these expressions more oftenthan either literal uses of the same sentences or non-slang equivalents that have similarpropositional meaning.

MethodSubjects. Fifty-two undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz

served as volunteer subjects. All of the subjects were native speakers of English.Stimuli and design. The stimuli and design were identical to those used in Experiment

1 with the following exceptions. All of the stories were tape-recorded on a Sony Cassetterecorder by two speakers, one male and one female. Each Set was recorded on a tapeand when played to subjects lasted approximately 10 minutes.

Procedure. Subjects were randomly assigned to hear one of the four tapes. Subjectswere instructed to listen carefully to the stories on the tape because afterwards theywould be asked some questions about what they had heard. The tape was then played forthe subjects. As soon as this was done, subjects participated in a mental arithmetic taskfor five minutes. After this, subjects were asked to remember the stories they had heardand write down as accurately as possible the last line of each story. They were givenapproximately 15 minutes to complete the task. Similar to the first study, subjects wereinformally interviewed during the debriefing as to whether they thought there wasanything unusual about the stimuH used in the study. Once again, few subjects reportedany distinct awareness of the presence of slang metaphors in particular, and no subjectsindicated that the use of such expressions in a psychology experiment was at all peculiar.

Results and discussion

Sentences were scored as being correctly recalled if they contained all the majorcontent words and had the same syntactic structure as the targets. Of all the sentencesrecalled, 98% were scored as being one of the targets, and thus there were fewreconstructive memory errors evident. The mean proportion of targets correctly recalled

188 Slang Metaphor

TABLE 3

Mean Proportion of Target Correctly Recalled in Experiment 2

Slang Contexts

Slang Metaphors Non-Slang Equivalents

.43 .31

Literal Contexts

Literal Controls

.25 .23

is presented in Table 3.A two-way analysis of variance on these data revealed a significant main effect of

Context F l ( l , 5 1 ) = 23.38, p < 0.0001; F2( l , 23) = 16.19, p < 0.001; and a reliablemain effect of Target Type, F l ( l , 51) = 8.26, p < 0.01; F2(l , 23) = 5.93, p < 0.05.The interaction of Context and Target type was also significant across subjects, F l ( l , 51)= 5.22, p < 0.025; and was marginally reliable in the item analysis, F2( l , 23) = 3.96,p < 0.10. Further analysis on the individual means using Newman-Keuls tests showedthat subjects recalled slang metaphors more often than either non-slang equivalents (p< 0.05 across subjects and items), or literal targets (p < 0.01 across subjects and p < 0.05across items).

The results of this study support the idea that people recall slang metaphorsparticularly well because these utterances have a special pragmatic function inconversation. This makes good sense, given that slang metaphors are primarily used whenthe speaker and listener enjoy a special fraternity and allow the speaker to convey his orher attitude toward the thing being referred to. Recognition of the speaker's attitudemakes slang metaphors more distinctive and consequently more memorable than theother targets examined.

It is important to note that the memory superiority for the slang targets can not beattributed to any differences in the story contexts in how well they induce the meaningsof the targets. Moreover, these results can not be explained by the idea that slangexpressions are like long words, which should be recalled more often because they arestored as chunks in the mental lexicon. The results of Gibbs (1980, experiment 2)showed that people do not recall idiomatic expressions better than they do literdequivalents, despite the fact that idioms, such as kick the bucket, are often viewed as

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 189

single lexical items. Thus, the fact that slang expressions are to some extent lexicalizeddoes not necessarily mean that people should recall these targets more often than theydo literal sentences. Rather, it is the special pragmatic properties of slang metaphors thatmake these utterances memorable.

The results of Experiment 2 similarly suggest that memory for metaphorical utterancesdiffers depending on the exact pragmatic role a metaphor plays in some discourse and theway a metaphor interpersonally relates speakers and hearers. Thus, people may not beparticularly good at remembering metaphorical expressions, such as The ivy crept up tothe window, because this utterance does not have the same pragmatic importance inconversation as do slang metaphois.

Finally, the data from this study do not support the idea that literal uses of slangshould be well remembered because of subjects' performing a "double-take" analysison these targets where they automatically process the conventional, slang meanings ofthe targets before figuring out their literal meanings. However, the special pragmaticproperties associated with slang metaphors may have been great enough to make theseexpressions more memorable than literal targets, even though subjects did somethingof a "double-take" on the literal sentences.

EXPERIMENT 3

In Experiment 3, we used a cued-recall task to examine the memory representationfor slang metaphors and literal uses of the same expressions. Other researchers (Gibbs,1980; Honeck, Reichmann and Hoffman, 1975; Tulving and Thompson, 1973; Verbruggeand McCanell, 1977) have shown that prompted recall provides a sensitive measure ofany inferential activity that may occur during comprehension of verbal material. Inparticular, we examined the "double-take" hypothesis which suggests that subjectscomprehending literal uses of slang metaphors actually process the conventional, slanginterpretations before deciding that their literal meanings were appropriate.

Subjects listened to a tape recording consisting of stories ending in either slangmetaphors (e.g.. He's on a trip meaning "He's using drugs") or literal targets (e.g.. He'son a trip meaning "He's on vacation"), along with some filler stories. After a short delay,subjects were given a list of recall prompts and were asked to recall the last line of eachstory that corresponded to each prompt. Half of the time subjects received prompts thatparaphrased the literal meanings of the targets (e.g., "He's on vacation"), and half of thetime they received prompts that paraphrased the slang meanings of the targets (e.g.,"He's using drugs"). We expected that if subjects actually did a "double-take" whenunderstanding literal uses of slang metaphors, then the slang prompts should facilitaterecall of these targets. This should be so even though th^ slang prompts have nothingto do with the meanings of these literal targets. On the other hand, the literal promptsshould not be effective in facilitating subjects' recall of the slang targets. This predictionis based on the idea that subjects do not compute the literal meanings of slang metaphorsbefore deriving their nonliteral, slang interpretations.

190 Slang Metaphor

Method

Subjects. Forty undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz servedas subjects. They received course credit for their participation.

Stimuli and design. There were two sets of material. Each set contained 24 stories, 12ending in slang expressions and 12 ending in literal uses of slang expressions. Thesestories were identical to the ones used in Experiment 2 except that the non-slangequivalents and the literal equivalents were now excluded. This was done because theequivalent expressions were subsequently used as recall prompts in the memory phaseof the experiment. T^e sets were constructed such that the target sentences that hadslang interpretations in Set A were presented in literal contexts, and thus had literalmeanings in Set B. In addition to these stories, each Set also contained 12 filler storiesending in non-slang targets. These were included to prevent subjects from getting into apossible "slang mode" of processing the last sentence of each story.

The recall prompts were simply the non-slang equivalents and the literal equivalentsused in Experiments 1 and 2. Thus, if subjects heard the target sentence It's my pad(used either as a slang metaphor or as a literal statement), they subsequently receivedeither the slang prompt It's my apartment or the literal prompt It's my notebook. Duringrecall, subjects received a booklet that contained either literal or slang prompts. Thus,each subject saw some prompts that were relevant to the target sentences they had heardand others that were irrelevant.

Procedure. In the acquisition phase of the experiment, subjects were randomlyassigned to hear either Set-A or Set-B stories. The subjects were instructed to listencarefully to what they heard since they would be asked some questions about themafterwards. The tape was then played. Following this, subjects heard some unrelatedmaterial for approximately 10 minutes. For the recall phase of the experiment, subjectswere given a list of prompts and were asked to wdte down, as verbatim as possible,the last line of the story that corresponded to the prompt. It was emphasized that theprompts did not necessarily have anything to do with the actual words in the targetsentences but that they might be related to their meaning. Following the recallinstructions, subjects were given approximately 15 minutes to recall the sentences.

Results and discussionSentences were scored correct according to the same criteria used in Experiment 2.

The mean proportion of target sentences correctly recalled is presented in Table 4. Atwo-way analysis of variance revealed that subjects recalled more slang targets thanliteral ones, F l ( l , 39) = 5.24, p < 0.025;F2(1, 23) = 3.65,p < 0.05. Moreover, the slangcues facilitated recall much better than the literal prompts, F l ( l , 3 9 ) = 39.53, p <0.0001; F2(-l, 23) = 21.34,p < 0.0001. The interaction between Type of Sentence andType of Cue was marginally reliable across subjects, F l ( l , 3 9 ) = 3.03, p < 0.10; butwas not significant across items, F2( l , 23) = 0.34, p < 0.10.

Further examination of the individual means indicated that subjects recalled slangmetaphors significantly better given slang prompts than literal ones (p < 0.01 across

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 191

TABLE 4

Mean Proportion of Targets Correctly Recalled in Experiment 3

Target Sentences Recalled

Slang Metaphors Literal

Sentence Prompts

Slang .71 .61

Uteral .33 .37

subjects and items). This supports the conclusions of Experiment 1 that people werenot analyzing the literal meanings of the slang metaphors before deriving their intendednonliteral interpretations. Interestingly, subjects also recalled literal uses of slang muchmore often when they were prompted by slang cues than when they were cued by literalprompts (p < 0.01 across both subjects and items). This finding suggests that subjectsmust have automatically analyzed the nonliteral, slang interpretations of theseexpressions before figuring out that they were intended to have Kteral meanings. Such a"double-take" reaction makes the literal uses of slang more difficult to comprehend thanthe literal equivalent sentences in Experiment 1.

The fact that the slang prompts facilitated recall for the literal targets better than theliteral cues (p < 0.01 across subjects and p < 0.05 across items) is somewhat puzzling.Perhaps subjects recognized at a very conscious level that the literal targets weresomewhat odd in that they were literal uses of sentences normally used as slangexpressions. This could have (a) accounted for the extra time needed to understand themas shown by the results of Experiment 1, and (b) have resulted in subjects' rememberingthem as being literal uses of slang, and thus the slang cues were superior in promptingtheir recall. It is doubtful that this finding is due to any idiosyncratic aspect of theliteral recall cues, given that they were simply the literal equivalents tested in the previousstudies and were earlier judged as being equally good paraphrases as the slang prompts(see the Method section under EXPERIMENT 1). In any event, these data suggest that evenwhen slang metaphors are intended in their literal sense, people tend to remember themas being slang expressions, although they conectly perceive them as having literal meaning(see the rating study and the results of the paraphrase judgments in EXPERIMENT 1).

192 Slang Metaphor

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The results of the present experiments suggest that slang metaphors are not moredifficult to comprehend and remember than are more "literal" uses of language. Thesefindings make sense, given that slang metaphors serve a unique pragmatic functionbecause speakers can convey their attitudes toward the topic mentioned by their use ofslang metaphors. Recognition that a speaker is using a slang metaphor enables the hearerto easily assume the speaker's intended meaning and to remember that a slang metaphorhas been used.

The data from Experiment 1 indicated that slang metaphors are easier to integrateinto the context of the conversation than are literal uses of the same expressions ornon-slang equivalent utterances. These results support the idea that people do notnecessarily need to process the literal meanings of slang before deriving their conveyed,nonliteral interpretations. The fact that slang metaphors have strong conventionalmeanings associated with them makes these quite easy to process; thus, they can actuallybe understood more quickly than either literal uses of the same sentences or non-slangequivalent utterances. It is in this way that slang metaphors differ from more innovativekinds of metaphor which are not necessarily comprehended faster than literal statements(seeOrtonyefa/., 1978).

One important finding in Experiment 1 was that subjects were faster at processing thefirst slang metaphor they encountered than they were to read the first literal sentencein the experiment. This finding rules out the possibility that subjects were quicker atunderstanding slang because they were in some sort of special "slang mode" ofprocessing, given the relatively large number of these expressions in the experiment. Assuch, it appears unlikely that the various slang expressions examined in these studies arerepresented in a special "slang dictionary" that is separate from the normal lexicon.Instead, it seems that slang metaphors are represented as part of the normal lexicon andto some extent appear to be lexicalized as if they were long, single words.

In addition, as the results of Experiment 3 demonstrated, when a literal use of a slangmetaphor is encountered, people tend to automatically analyze the conventional, slanginterpretation of the utterance before deciding that the literal meaning is intended andappropriate. These data are similar to those found for understanding idiomaticexpressions (Gibbs, 1980) and argue against the Standard Pragmatic Model of nonliterallanguage processing in which the literal meaning of an utterance is first determinedbefore the conveyed meaning is derived. Other empirical evidence casts doubts on thepossibility that people must process the literal and conveyed meanings of nonliteralutterances during comprehension (cf. Gibbs, 1983, 1984,1985). Literal meaning appearsto be important only to the extent it relates to the speaker's intention in ordinaryconversational contexts (see Gibbs, 1982,1984).

One area where slang metaphors differ from idiomatic expressions and metaphorconcerns their memorability. The results of Experiment 2 showed that subjects betterrecalled slang metaphors than either literal uses of the same expressions or non-slangequivalent targets. This resuh supports the idea that slang metaphors are high ininteractional content (cf. Keenan et al, 1977) and serve a unique pragmatic function

R. W. Gibbs, Jr. and A. Nagaoka 193

in relating speakers and hearers (Nunberg, 1978). Previous studies on memory fornonliteral speech have indicated that people either do not recall metaphors better thanliteral statements (Harris et al., 1980) or that people actually recalled literal uses ofidioms better than conventional, idiomatic uses of the same expressions (Gibbs, 1980).As such, the data from Experiment 2 suggest that memory for nonliteral language differsdepending on the pragmatic function of the speech examined and its degree offamiliarity.

In sum, the data from the present studies highlight the importance of understandingthe pragmatic function of nonliteral speech. Slang metaphors are interesting because theyconvey the speaker's attitude toward what is being referred to as part of their meaning.Models of understanding and remembering language should be sensitive to exactly how aparticular piece of language relates speakers and hearers and what effect this has on theway an utterance is understood and remembered.

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APPENDIX

Slang Metaphors used as Stimuli

Go cut the grass.Give me some acid.

It was a bomb.I need some bread.

That's garbage.Let's kill it.What a pig.

It was a scream.He has scored.

I can't swallow it.It was rough.

She has nothing upstairs.

What's cooking?Let's wrap it up.

He's lame.He's on a trip.It's a lemon.

Can you dig it?It's fixed.

It's my pad.I'm going to buy a rug.

It's real hot.Hold the onions.I have the blues.