Table 2.
Means of sentential and lexical properties of metaphors and literals.
| Properties | CMs | Literals | NMs | Literals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M (SD) | M (SD) | M (SD) | M (SD) | |
| Sentences | ||||
| Novelty | 2.229 (0.60) | 1.178 (0.20) | 4.915 (0.56) | 1.349 (0.43) |
| Familiarity | 5.482 (0.74) | 5.724 (0.71) | 4.187 (1.02) | 5.701 (1.00) |
| Reading ease | 6.221 (0.43) | 6.344 (0.40) | 5.777 (0.56) | 6.091 (0.68) |
| Words | 5.540 (0.66) | 5.670 (0.82) | 5.540 (0.66) | 5.620 (0.82) |
| Letters | 25.46 (2.02) | 25.08 (3.12) | 25.58 (3.40) | 23.88 (3.84) |
| Verbs | ||||
| Letters | 4.580 (0.97) | 5.000 (0.93) | ||
| Frequency | 0.865 (0.80) | 0.532 (0.62) | ||
| Familiarity | 6.607 (0.50) | 6.227 (0.81) | ||
| Concreteness | 5.008 (0.95) | 5.115 (0.52) | ||
| Imageability | 5.242 (0.67) | 5.295 (0.49) | ||
| Embodiment | 6.085 (0.53) | 5.798 (1.19) | ||
CMs are conventional metaphors, and NMs are novel metaphors. Frequency values were taken from iWeb as average log per million frequency. The values for concreteness and imageability were converted from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart, 1981). The ratings for embodiment were based on relative embodiment (Sidhu et al., 2014).