The comprehension and recall of similes as a function of context and cue

Participants read 56 sentence pairs and attempted to judge if the context sentence of each pair was related to the figurative message of the following simile. Reaction times and error rates both indicated that (a) participants could judge subject-related contexts more easily that predicate-related contexts, (b) they could judge irrelevant contexts more easily than misleading ones, and (c) these two effects were relatively independent of one another. The cued recall of similes previously paired with relevant or misleading contexts was affected by both a context effect (contexts containing a simile's predicate led to better recall than those containing its subject) and, even more strongly, a cuing effect (the simile's predicate was a better cue than its subject), whereas the cued recall of similes previously paired with irrelevant contexts was affected only by the context effect. In no case was there evidence of an interaction that would have indicated that a cue would be more potent if it referred to the same simile term as had the context.