Starting from one of the most dominant concepts in cognitive sciences, metaphor, this research paper explores how individual differences in fluid and crystallized intelligence influence the comprehension of metaphors normed with regards to their features of metaphoricity, aptness and familiarity in Serbian. More precisely, it investigates the interrelatedness between fluid and crystallized intelligence, on the one hand, and the comprehension of non-literary and literary metaphors on the other. The research is designed in such a way so as to compare the success on intelligence tests to the success on metaphor comprehension tests (two types of metaphor with regards to three dimensions). That is why 6 questionnaries consisting of three different tests were composed – Raven’s Progesssive Matrices, Semantic Similiarties Test and the open interpretation test of metaphors. The first two tests measure fluid and crystallized intelligence, respectively, whereas the last one measures the ability ...to understand and interpret non-literary and literary metaphor. The participants who completed the questionnaire are university students whose mother tongue is Serbian or who speak Serbian fluently. This paper is built on several theories and models, the most important of which are the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence (Horn & Catell, 1966), the model of analogical reasoning (Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1981, 1982; Trick & Katz, 1986; Gentner & Clement, 1988) and the model of conceptual combination/categorization (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1993; Estes & Glucksberg, 2000; Glucksberg & Haught, 2006; Jones & Estes, 2005, 2006). When it comes to the statistical analysis, the main focus was on correlations and partial correlations of the selected variables. After analysing the correlations between the intelligence tests and metaphor comprehension tests, a
detailed description of the results is given in order to present their significance, draw conclusions and relate them to the paper’s aims, theoretical framework and previos research. The quantitative analysis of the results shows that the correlations between the individual difference measures and metaphor comprehension tests are significant. Namely, the obtained results confirm that cognitively more complex metaphors, such as literary, are primarily understood by using crystallized intelligence, and by relying on fluid intelligence to a certain extent, whereas simpler non-literary metaphors are mostly understood by using crystallized intelligence, as well as that the intelligence influence depends on metaphor features with regards to which they were normed.
