Reading Malay literal and metaphorical expressions: An eye tracking study

Abstract

Malay, like any other languages in the world, is known for its diverse metaphorical expressions to convey specific purposes as an alternative to the literal expressions. Although typically, speakers of a language are able to distinguish literal expressions from the metaphorical ones, little is known about how these differences are identified in the cognition. Hence, this paper discusses findings of a study that investigates the cognitive processes in reading Malay literal and metaphorical expressions from a psycholinguistic perspective. This study that involved 40 Malay students reading 40 Malay sentences with 20 literal and 20 metaphorical expressions used the Tobii TX300 Eye Tracking Devices (APGM) as a tool to link eye movement patterns with reader’s cognition. The findings show that only six out of the 20 expressions studied show significant differences between the two expression types in their visit counts, fixation duration, and fixation counts. Qualitatively, analysis of visual representation of heatmaps and gaze plots shows differences when the two types of expressions are read. To explain the difference, the DBP corpus data was used to see how the expressions are used in everyday contexts. This paper concludes that the processing patterns of Malay literal and metaphorical expressions in the cognition of Malay speakers are influenced by the frequency of usage by their speakers.