Creative metaphor comprehension in L2 speakers of English

Most research on metaphor comprehension in second language (L2) speakers focuses on conventionalised expressions (e.g., Littlemore et al. 2011; Mashal et al. 2015), whereas L2 comprehension of novel metaphorical expressions has not been given much attention (Jankowiak et al., 2017). This paper investigates the extent to which L2 speakers at different levels of proficiency differentiate between creative metaphors classified as easy and hard to comprehend. A self-paced reading task combined with sensicality judgements was used to test two groups of participants: L2 speakers of English with low/intermediate and advanced proficiency. The study examined reading times and answers to the sensicality judgements which inquired about whether the metaphors make sense. Th e results show that the advanced group of speakers more often judges that creative metaphors make sense, but in the case of reading time, profi ciency has no significant effect on the understanding of different types of metaphors. Based on the absence of interaction between the groups and the type of metaphor, it can be concluded that the skills needed to understand the metaphor are partially transferred from the first language, however, the results of the sensicality judgments show that the advanced group judges significantly more that creative metaphors (regardless of difficulty) are meaningful. This indicates that with advanced knowledge of the language comes richer semantic representations, so advanced speakers more easily activate features of concepts that are otherwise more difficult to activate.