The role of literal meaning in figurative language comprehension: evidence from masked priming ERP

Pre-Stimulus Activity of Left and Right TPJ in Linguistic Predictive Processing: A MEG Study

BACKGROUND

The left and right temporoparietal junctions (TPJs) are two brain areas involved in several brain networks, largely studied for their diverse roles, from attentional orientation to theory of mind and, recently, predictive processing. In predictive processing, one crucial concept is prior precision, that is, the reliability of the predictions of incoming stimuli. This has been linked with modulations of alpha power as measured with electrophysiological techniques, but TPJs have seldom been studied in this framework.

METHODS

The present article investigates, using magnetoencephalography, whether spontaneous oscillations in pre-stimulus alpha power in the left and right TPJs can modulate brain responses during a linguistic task that requires predictive processing in literal and non-literal sentences.

RESULTS

Overall, results show that pre-stimulus alpha power in the rTPJ was associated with post-stimulus responses only in the left superior temporal gyrus, while lTPJ pre-stimulus alpha power was associated with post-stimulus activity in Broca's area, left middle temporal gyrus, and left superior temporal gyrus.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that both the right and left TPJs have a role in linguistic prediction, involving a network of core language regions, with differences across brain areas and linguistic conditions that can be parsimoniously explained in the context of predictive processing.

Is metaphor a natural kind?

In Metaphor Studies, metaphor is considered as a "form of understanding one thing in terms of something else." It is assumed that, despite their differences, metaphors share many properties and that a theory of metaphor should capture these essential properties. In short, it is assumed that metaphor is a natural kind. We call this view the Natural Kind Assumption. In this paper, we will challenge it and show that metaphor is not a natural kind. Finally, we will discuss the main philosophical consequences of this view.

Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Language Acquisition and Processing

The earliest investigations of the neural implementation of language started with examining patients with various types of disorders and underlying brain damage [...].

Neuropragmatics: A scientometric review

Neuropragmatics investigates brain functions and neural activities responsible for pragmatic language abilities, often impaired in disorders such as hemisphere damage, autism, schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative disorders. This study examined the development of neuropragmatics and existing neuroimaging evidence using bibliometric and scientometric indicators, analyzing 4,247 documents published between 1967 and 2022 with CiteSpace and VOSviewer. Our cluster analysis revealed key themes. 1) Language comprehension loss due to brain injury: Studies exploring the impact of brain injuries on language comprehension and underlying neural mechanisms. 2) Right hemisphere damage and pragmatic language skills: Research focusing on the relationship between right hemisphere damage and pragmatic language abilities, investigating impairments in social language use and potential neural correlates. 3) Traumatic brain injury and social communication assessment: Research on traumatic brain injury effects on social communication skills, using various assessment tools to evaluate communication effectiveness in social situations. These clusters provide valuable insights into the neuropragmatics field and serve as a framework for future investigations. By building upon existing knowledge, researchers can improve our understanding of brain functions, language behavior, and enhance rehabilitation for individuals with pragmatic language impairments.

Conventionality determines the time course of indirect replies comprehension: An ERP study

Indirect language comprehension requires decoding both the literal meaning and the intended meaning of an utterance, in which pragmatic inference is involved. This study tests the role of conventionality in the time course of indirect reply processing by comparing conventional and non-conventional indirect replies with direct reply, respectively. We constructed discourses which consist of a context and a dialogue with one question (e.g., May I buy a necklace for you) and one reply (e.g., I really have too many). The reply utterance was segmented into three phrases and presented orderly for EEG recording, e.g., with the subject as the first phrase (e.g., I), the adverbial as the second phrase (e.g., really), and the predicate as the third phrase (e.g., have too many). Our results showed that for conventional indirect replies, the second phrase elicited a larger anterior negativity, and the third phrase elicited a larger anterior N400 compared with those in direct replies. By contrast, for the non-conventional indirect reply, only the third phrase elicited a larger late negativity than the direct replies. These findings suggest that conventionality determines the time course of the pragmatic inferences for the most relevant interpretation during indirect replies comprehension.

Comprehending scientific metaphors in the bilingual brain: Evidence from event-related potentials

While the processing mechanisms of novel and conventional metaphors were widely investigated in previous monolingual studies, little attention has been devoted to how metaphoric utterances are processed by the bilingual brain as well as how scientific context might modulate such processes. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this paper investigates the way in which scientific metaphors are electrophysiologically processed in Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with the aim of investigating the different mechanisms for understanding metaphorical language in first (L1) and second (L2) languages. By time-locking the N400 and later LPC time windows, the research show how meaning integration differs between L1 and L2 at different stages when comprehending figurative language. We found that compared with Chinese scientific metaphors, English scientific metaphors elicited greater N400, smaller late positive component (LPC), and greater late negativity, and English literals elicited greater late negativity. Our findings suggest that the dynamics of processing figurative meaning in bilingual brains over time show a complex pattern, with language, context, inference and salience jointly modulating temporal dynamics and possible cerebral asymmetries, supporting the revised hierarchical model.

N400 differences between physical and mental metaphors: The role of Theories of Mind

Whether Theory of Mind (ToM) contributes to metaphor understanding has been largely investigated in language acquisition and decay. Yet we know very little about the role of ToM in real-time processing of metaphors in neurotypical adults. Here, we tested the relationship between ToM and metaphor through Event Related Potentials (ERPs) by capitalizing on the difference between metaphors inviting inferences on physical (Boxers are pandas) vs. mental aspects (Teachers are books). Physical metaphors involved a larger and sustained negativity compared to mental ones. This pattern resembled concreteness effects and suggests that physical metaphors may benefit from both verbal and perceptual information. Moreover, higher scores in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), but not in the Animation task, were associated with a reduction of the N400 amplitude for both physical and mental metaphors. When exploring the ERP temporal trajectory with Generalized Additive Mixed Modeling, earlier differences between metaphors characterized individuals with higher RMET scores. Among the various ToM components, thus, emotion recognition seems to be involved in the processing of metaphors in general, with an earlier impact on the mental type. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of metaphor, at the crossroad of language, social and perceptual experience.

Is the Processing of Chinese Verbal Metaphors Simulated or Abstracted? Evidence From an ERP Study

The theory of embodied semantics holds that verbal metaphors are strongly grounded in sensorimotor experience. Many studies have proven that besides sensorimotor simulation, the comprehension of verbal metaphors also requires semantic abstraction. But the interaction between simulation and abstraction, as well as the time course of metaphorical meaning integration, is not well understood. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether embodiment or abstraction, or both, is employed in the processing of Chinese verbal metaphor. Participants were asked to read subject-verb metaphorical, verb-object metaphorical, literal-concrete and literal-abstract sentences, and the target words were measured at the verb and the object of each sentence. The results revealed that a similar N400 effect was elicited by the target verbs in the verb-object metaphorical and the literal-concrete sentences, and a similar P600/LPC effect was induced by the target verbs in the subject-verb metaphorical and the literal-abstract sentences, reflecting that the verb-object metaphors trigger a simulation process, while the subject-verb metaphors trigger an abstraction process in the verb processing stage. Moreover, the subject-verb metaphors elicited a stronger P600/LPC effect by the target verbs than the verb-object metaphors, but there was no difference of the P600/LPC caused by the target objects between the two kinds of metaphors, revealing that the metaphorical meaning of a subject-verb metaphor is integrated in the verb processing stage, while that of a verb-object metaphor is reanalyzed in the object processing stage. These results suggest that a verbal metaphor is processed both by simulation and abstraction, and the metaphorical meaning is integrated immediately with the unfolding of the sentence meaning. The position where the semantic conflict lies in a sentence (verb vs. object) modulates the time course of metaphor sentence comprehension.

Bilingual Processing Mechanisms of Scientific Metaphors and Conventional Metaphors: Evidence via a Contrastive Event-Related Potentials Study

To study the different mechanisms of understanding figurative language in a speaker’s native language (L1) and their second language (L2), this study investigated how scientific metaphors in Chinese (L1) and English (L2) are electrophysiologically processed via event-related potential experimentation. Compared with the metaphors from daily life or in literary works, scientific metaphors tend to involve both a more complicated context structure and a distinct knowledge-inferencing process. During the N400 time window (300–500 ms), English scientific metaphors elicited more negative N400s than Chinese ones at the parietal region. In the late positive component (LPC) time window (550–800 ms), English scientific metaphors elicited less positive LPCs than Chinese ones at the parietal region, and larger late negativities encompassing smaller areas of the brain. The findings might indicate that for late unbalanced bilingual speakers, L2 scientific metaphor comprehension requires more effort in information retrieval or access to the non-literal route. Altogether, the possible findings are that non-native and non-dominant language processing involves decreased automaticity of cognitive mechanisms, and decreased sensitivity to the levels of conventionality of metaphoric meanings.

The Effects of Working Memory Capacity in Metaphor and Metonymy Comprehension in Mandarin-English Bilinguals' Minds: An fMRI Study

This study investigated the role of working memory capacity (WMC) in metaphoric and metonymic processing in Mandarin-English bilinguals' minds. It also explored the neural correlations between metaphor and metonymy computations. We adopted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design, which consisted of 21 English dialogic sets of stimuli and 5 conditions: systematic literal, circumstantial literal, metaphor, systematic metonymy, and circumstantial metonymy, all contextualized in daily conversations. Similar fronto-temporal networks were found for the figurative language processing patterns: the superior temporal gyrus (STG) for metaphorical comprehension, and the inferior parietal junction (IPJ) for metonymic processing. Consistent brain regions have been identified in previous studies in the homologue right hemisphere of better WMC bilinguals. The degree to which bilateral strategies that bilinguals with better WMC or larger vocabulary size resort to is differently modulated by subtypes of metonymies. In particular, when processing circumstantial metonymy, the cuneus (where putamen is contained) is activated as higher-span bilinguals filter out irrelevant information, resorting to inhibitory control use. Cingulate gyrus activation has also been revealed in better WMC bilinguals, reflecting their mental flexibility to adopt the subjective perspective of critical figurative items with self-control. It is hoped that this research provides a better understanding of Mandarin-English bilinguals' English metaphoric and metonymic processing in Taiwan.

Is theology more of a field than a father is a king? Modelling semantic relatedness in processing literal and metaphorical statements

One major question in the study of metaphors historically is: Are different mechanisms involved in the comprehension of figurative statements versus literal statements? Many studies have addressed this question from a variety of perspectives, with mixed results. Following Harati, Westbury, and Kiaee (Behavior Research Methods, 53, 2214-2225, 2021), we use a computational (word embedding) model of semantics to approach the question in a way that allows for the quantification of the semantic relationship between the two keywords in literal and metaphorical “x is a y” statements. We first demonstrate that almost all literal statements (95.2% of 582 statements we considered) have very high relatedness values. We then show that literality decisions are slower for literal statements with low relatedness and metaphorical statements with high relatedness. We find a similar but smaller effect attributable to the cosine of the vectors representing the two keywords. The fact that the same measurable characteristics allow us to predict which metaphors or literal sentences will have the slowest literality decision times suggests that the same processes underlie the comprehension of both literal and metaphorical statements.

The Elephant in the Room: A Systematic Review of Stimulus Control in Neuro-Measurement Studies on Figurative Language Processing

The processing of metaphors and idioms has been the subject of neuroscientific research for several decades. However, results are often contradictory, which can be traced back to inconsistent terminology and stimulus control. In this systematic review of research methods, we analyse linguistic aspects of 116 research papers which used EEG, fMRI, PET, MEG, or NIRS to investigate the neural processing of the two figurative subtypes metaphor and idiom. We critically examine the theoretical foundations as well as stimulus control by performing a systematic literature synthesis according to the PRISMA guidelines. We explicitly do not analyse the findings of the studies but instead focus on four primary aspects: definitions of figurative language and its subtypes, linguistic theory behind the studies, control for factors influencing figurative language processing, and the relationship between theoretical and operational definitions. We found both a lack and a broad variety in existing definitions and operationalisation, especially in regard to familiarity and conventionality. We identify severe obstacles in the comparability and validation potential of the results of the papers in our review corpus. We propose the development of a consensus in fundamental terminology and more transparency in the reporting of stimulus design in the research on figurative language processing.

Electrophysiological correlates of conventional metaphor, irony, and literal language processing - An event-related potentials and eLORETA study

Conventional metaphor, irony, and literal language processing were compared. Thirty right-handed participants (21-34 years) performed a sequential-statement ERP-paradigm. A left-frontal Late Anterior Negative Slow Wave (LANSW, 450-1000 ms) was significantly greater for metaphors and by visual tendency greater for irony, compared to literal statements. A centroparietal N400 (300-450 ms) and a centroparietal right-dominant "Late N400" (450-600 ms) were by statistical and visual tendency greater for metaphors. Left PCC and left lingual gyrus activity was significantly higher in metaphors compared to literal statements (eLORETA; 450-1000 ms). A statistical trend indicated higher parahippocampal gyrus activity in metaphors and ironies. N400 results are discussed considering changing processing techniques and a renewed semantic conflict. The Late N400 was associated with the construct of "associativeness". The LANSW was related to metaphorical mapping, frame-shifting processes, integration of meanings, and memory processes. eLORETA results were discussed considering metaphorical mapping, creation of mental images, conventionality, valence, memory processes, and divergent thinking.

What is the contribution of executive functions to communicative-pragmatic skills? Insights from aging and different types of pragmatic inference

The role of executive functions in supporting the pragmatics of communication has been extensively examined in clinical populations, but is still under-explored in healthy aging. In this study we addressed the role of executive skills, including inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, in older adults' communicative-pragmatic abilities. Pragmatics was extensively assessed by measuring the understanding of figurative language, narrative texts, humor, and implicatures. A hierarchical regression analysis using composite scores evidenced a global effect of executive functions on communicative-pragmatic abilities, beyond demographic and theory of mind aspects. More fine-grained analyses showed that working memory was the strongest predictor of all pragmatic tasks. Specifically, comprehending narratives and humor seemed to capitalize primarily upon working memory, whereas figurative language and implicatures relied on working memory and to some extent cognitive flexibility. Conversely, inhibition did not stand out as a robust predictor of pragmatics. We argue that working memory allows for the simultaneous consideration of multiple pieces of information needed for pragmatic inferencing, and that only once working memory has played its role other executive aspects, such as cognitive flexibility and inhibition, might come into play. Overall, this study highlights the diverse role of executive skills in pragmatics in aging, and more generally contributes to shed light on pragmatic competence in older adults.

Pragmatic abilities in early Parkinson's disease

Language impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been investigated at different levels of linguistic skills. Only a few studies dealt with pragmatic abilities in PD, and these suggest an impairment of pragmatic skills, which might affect quality of life. However, previous studies enrolled patients with heterogeneous symptom severity. The goal of this study is twofold: first, to investigate whether pragmatic skills are compromised at the early stage of PD; second, to explore whether an early pragmatic impairment is explained by a decay of a specific cognitive function. We assessed pragmatic abilities (discourse production, comprehension of narratives, humour, and figurative language), and a cluster of cognitive functions (memory, verbal fluency, inhibition, shifting, and ToM) in a sample of early PD patients and a group of age-matched healthy controls. Early PD patients showed impaired general pragmatic skills (the ability to perform different pragmatic tasks in language production and comprehension), as well as a deficit in the production and comprehension individual scores. Our results suggest that good general cognitive skills (a good overall cognitive level) and high education support patients' pragmatic competence. Inhibitory processes have been found to predict patients' ability to understand figurative language, such as metaphors, and this might be related to frontal lobe dysfunctions.

The Role of Literal Features During Processing of Novel Verbal Metaphors

When a word is used metaphorically (for example “walrus” in the sentence “The president is a walrus”), some features of that word's meaning (“very fat,” “slow-moving”) are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features (“has large tusks,” “lives near the north pole”) are not. What happens to these features that relate only to the literal meaning during processing of novel metaphors? In four experiments, the present study examined the role of the feature of physical containment during processing of verbs of physical containment. That feature is used metaphorically to signify difficulty, such as “fenced in” in the sentence “the journalist's opinion was fenced in after the change in regime.” Results of a lexical decision task showed that video clips displaying a ball being trapped by a box facilitated comprehension of verbs of physical containment when the words were presented in isolation. However, when the verbs were embedded in sentences that rendered their interpretation metaphorical in a novel way, no such facilitation was found, as evidenced by two eye-tracking reading studies. We interpret this as suggesting that features that are critical for understanding the encoded meaning of verbs but are not part of the novel metaphoric interpretation are ignored during the construction of metaphorical meaning. Results and limitations of the paradigm are discussed in relation to previous findings in the literature both on metaphor comprehension and on the interaction between language comprehension and the visual world.

Metaphor Is Between Metonymy and Homonymy: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

The goal of the present study was to investigate the interaction between different senses of polysemous nouns (metonymies and metaphors) and different meanings of homonyms using the method of event-related potentials (ERPs) and a priming paradigm. Participants read two-word phrases containing ambiguous words and made a sensicality judgment. Phrases with polysemes highlighted their literal sense and were preceded by primes with either the same or different – metonymic or metaphorical – sense. Similarly, phrases with homonyms were primed by phrases with a consistent or inconsistent meaning of the noun. The results demonstrated that polysemous phrases with literal senses preceded by metonymic primes did not differ in ERP responses from the control condition with the same literal primes. In contrast, processing phrases with the literal sense preceded by metaphorical primes resulted in N400 and P600 effects that might reflect a very limited priming effect. The priming effect observed between metonymic and literal senses supports the idea that these senses share a single representation in the mental lexicon. In contrast, the effects observed for polysemes with metaphorical primes characterize lexical access to the word’s target sense and competition between the two word senses. The processing of homonyms preceded by the prime with an inconsistent meaning, although it did not elicit an N400 effect, was accompanied by a P600 effect as compared to the control condition with a consistent meaning of the prime. We suppose that the absence of the N400 effect may result from inhibition of the target meaning by the inconsistent prime, whereas the P600 response might reflect processes of reanalysis, activation, and integration of the target meaning. Our results provide additional evidence for the difference in processing mechanisms between metonymies and metaphors that might have separate representations in the mental lexicon, although they are more related as compared to homonyms.

An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making

Neuroimaging studies show that metaphors activate sensorimotor areas. These findings were interpreted as metaphors contributing to conceptual thought by mapping concrete, somatosensory information onto abstract ideas. But is sensorimotor information a necessary constituent of figurative meaning? The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a divided visual field paradigm with healthy adults to explore the role of sensorimotor feature processing in the comprehension of novel metaphors via the electrophysiological concreteness effect. Participants read French, novel adjective-noun expressions that were either metaphorical (“fat sentence”) or literal (“fat hip”). While literal expressions evoked a typical concreteness effect, an enhanced frontal negativity during right hemisphere (RH) as opposed to left hemisphere (LH) presentation, metaphors showed no such sign of sensorimotor feature processing. Relative to literals, they evoked a sustained frontal negativity during LH presentation and similar amplitudes during RH presentation, but both of these effects were the greater the more abstract the metaphors were. It is the first time such an electrophysiological abstractness effect is reported, just the opposite of a concreteness effect. It is particularly noteworthy that ERPs evoked by metaphors were not contingent on figurativeness, novelty, meaningfulness, imageability, emotional valence, or arousal, only on abstractness. When compared with similarly novel literal expressions, metaphors did not evoke a typical N400 and did not activate the RH either. The findings shed new light on the neurocognitive machinery of figurative meaning construction, pervasive in everyday communication. Contrary to embodied cognition, the conceptual system might be organized around abstract representations and not sensorimotor information, even for lush, metaphorical language.

A transformer-based approach to irony and sarcasm detection

Figurative language (FL) seems ubiquitous in all social media discussion forums and chats, posing extra challenges to sentiment analysis endeavors. Identification of FL schemas in short texts remains largely an unresolved issue in the broader field of natural language processing, mainly due to their contradictory and metaphorical meaning content. The main FL expression forms are sarcasm, irony and metaphor. In the present paper, we employ advanced deep learning methodologies to tackle the problem of identifying the aforementioned FL forms. Significantly extending our previous work (Potamias et al., in: International conference on engineering applications of neural networks, Springer, Berlin, pp 164–175, 2019), we propose a neural network methodology that builds on a recently proposed pre-trained transformer-based network architecture which is further enhanced with the employment and devise of a recurrent convolutional neural network. With this setup, data preprocessing is kept in minimum. The performance of the devised hybrid neural architecture is tested on four benchmark datasets, and contrasted with other relevant state-of-the-art methodologies and systems. Results demonstrate that the proposed methodology achieves state-of-the-art performance under all benchmark datasets, outperforming, even by a large margin, all other methodologies and published studies.

Revealing Unconscious Consumer Reactions to Advertisements That Include Visual Metaphors. A Neurophysiological Experiment

The main challenge of advertising is to catch consumers' attention and evoke in them positive attitudes to consequently achieve product preference and higher purchase intentions. In modern advertising, visual metaphors are widely used due to their effects such as improving advertising recall, enhancing persuasiveness, and generating consumers' positive attitudes. Previous research has pointed out the existence of an "inverted U-curve" that describes a positive relationship between the conceptual complexity of metaphors and consumers' positive reactions to them, which ends where complexity outweighs comprehension. Despite the dominance of visual metaphors in modern advertising, academic research on this topic has been relatively sparse. The inverted U-curve pattern has been validated regarding ad appreciation, ad liking, and purchase intention by using declarative methods. However, at present, there is no evidence of consumers' neurophysiological responses to visual metaphors included in advertising. Given this gap, the aim of this research is to assess consumer neurophysiological responses to print advertisements that include visual metaphors, using neuroscience-based techniques. Forty-three participants (22W-21M) were exposed to 28 stimuli according to three levels of visual complexity, while their reactions were recorded with an electroencephalogram (EEG), eye tracking (ET), and galvanic skin response (GSR). The results indicated that, regardless of metaphor type, ads with metaphors evoke more positive reactions than non-metaphor ads. EEG results revealed a positive relationship between cognitive load and conceptual complexity that is not mediated by comprehension. This suggests that the cognitive load index could be a suitable indicator of complexity, as it reflects the amount of cognitive resources needed to process stimuli. ET results showed significant differences in the time dedicated to exploring the ads; however, comprehension doesn't mediate this relationship. Moreover, no cognitive load was detected from GSR. ET and GSR results suggest that neither methodology is a suitable measure of cognitive load in the case of visual metaphors. Instead, it seems that they are more related to the attention and/or emotion devoted to the stimuli. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of using neurophysiological measures to analyze the appropriate use of visual metaphors and to find out how to maximize their impact on advertising effectiveness.

A leopard cannot change its spots: A novel pragmatic account of concretism in schizophrenia

Concretism is a well-known feature of schizophrenia, tracing back to the early descriptions of the disease and commonly associated with the literal interpretation of figurative expressions such as proverbs, metaphors, and idioms. However, figurative expressions are not all alike in terms of linguistic and pragmatic processes. Determining if some figurative types are more impaired than others and if the type of task affects the performance constitutes an open issue with implications for the description of the clinical profile and for treatment. We run a fine-grained assessment of figurative language comprehension by comparing 47 patients with schizophrenia and 39 controls in three figurative types (idioms, metaphors, proverbs) presented in two response formats (multiple-choice, verbal-explanation), considering also the role of cognitive and clinical variables and the impact on quality of life. Mixed-effects models analysis revealed that: i) patients performed worse than controls across figurative types and response formats, indicating a diffuse impairment; ii) there is an interplay of figurative type and response format, which makes verbal-explanation of proverbs especially challenging; iii) in patients, problems in figurative language are largely connected with formal thought disorder and global IQ. Moreover, multiple-choice of metaphors was associated with patients' quality of life. This study offers a novel account of concretism, framed in pragmatics and figurative language processing. Adopting this perspective allowed us to describe the nuances of concretism, which areas in the figurative domain are especially challenging for patients and which ones capture differences in functioning, in order to guide intervention programs and integration in society.

Speedy Metonymy, Tricky Metaphor, Irrelevant Compositionality: How Nonliteralness Affects Idioms in Reading and Rating

It is widely acknowledged that fixed expressions such as idioms have a processing advantage over non-idiomatic language. While many idioms are metaphoric, metonymic, or even literal, the effect of varying nonliteralness in their processing has not been much researched yet. Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that metonymies are easier to process than metaphors but it is unclear whether this applies to idioms. Two self-paced reading experiments test whether metonymic, metaphoric, or literal idioms have a greater processing advantage over non-idiomatic control sentences, and whether this is caused by varying nonliteralness. Both studies find that metonymic and literal idioms are read significantly faster than controls, while the advantage for metaphoric idioms is only tenuous. Only experiment 2 finds literal idioms to be read fastest of all. As compositionality of the idioms cannot account for these findings, some effect of nonliteralness is suggested, together with idiomaticity and the sentential context.

Understanding associative vs. abstract pictorial relations: An ERP study

One of the most remarkable human abilities is extracting relations between objects, words or ideas - a process that underlies perception, learning and reasoning. Yet, perhaps due to its complexity, surprisingly little is known about the neural basis of this fundamental ability. Here, we examined EEG waveforms evoked by different types of relations, conveyed by pairs of images. Subjects were presented with the pairs, that were either associatively related, abstractly related or unrelated, and judged if they were related or not. Evidence for a gradual modulation of the amplitude of the N400 and late negativity was found, such that unrelated pairs elicited the most negative amplitude, followed by abstractly-related pairs and lastly associatively-related ones. However, this was confined to first encounter with the pairs, and a different, more dichotomous pattern was observed when the pairs were viewed for the second time. Then, no difference was found between associatively and abstractly related pairs, while both differed from unrelated pairs. Notably, when the pairs were sequentially presented, this pattern was found mostly in right electrodes, while it appeared both in left and right sites during simultaneous presentation of the pairs. This suggests that while two different mechanisms may be involved in generating predictions about an upcoming related/unrelated stimulus, online processing of associative and abstract semantic relations might be mediated by a single mechanism. Our results further support claims that the N400 component indexes multiple cognitive processes that overlap in time, yet not necessarily in neural generators.

Concrete processing of action metaphors: Evidence from ERP

The timing of sensory-motor activation during the comprehension of action verbs used in a metaphorical sense is not well understood. In the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study, participants read verbs in metaphoric (The church bent the rules), literal-concrete (The bodyguard bent the rod), and literal-abstract (The church altered the rules) conditions. The literal concreteness effect, obtained by subtracting the abstract from the concrete, was revealed as an N400, frontally distributed. A metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-abstract contrast, was a widespread N400, and included the frontal response seen in the literal concreteness effect. Another metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-concrete contrast, was a posterior N400. Further time window analyses showed that the literal concreteness effect primarily came from 200 to 300 ms, the metaphoric-concrete effect primarily came from 200 to 400 ms, and the metaphoric-abstract effect was significant throughout 200-500 ms. These results suggest that a concrete but underspecified meaning consistent with metaphoric and literal readings, was activated early and was sustained throughout the 200-500 ms window. We concluded that the metaphoric sense is based in concrete action semantics, even if these senses are underspecified.

Re-Representing Metaphor: Modeling Metaphor Perception Using Dynamically Contextual Distributional Semantics

In this paper, we present a novel context-dependent approach to modeling word meaning, and apply it to the modeling of metaphor. In distributional semantic approaches, words are represented as points in a high dimensional space generated from co-occurrence statistics; the distances between points may then be used to quantifying semantic relationships. Contrary to other approaches which use static, global representations, our approach discovers contextualized representations by dynamically projecting low-dimensional subspaces; in these ad hoc spaces, words can be re-represented in an open-ended assortment of geometrical and conceptual configurations as appropriate for particular contexts. We hypothesize that this context-specific re-representation enables a more effective model of the semantics of metaphor than standard static approaches. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of English word dyads rated for degrees of metaphoricity, meaningfulness, and familiarity by human participants. We demonstrate that our model captures these ratings more effectively than a state-of-the-art static model, and does so via the amount of contextualizing work inherent in the re-representational process.

Time-Course of Motor Involvement in Literal and Metaphoric Action Sentence Processing: A TMS Study

There is evidence that the motor cortex is involved in reading sentences containing an action verb ("The spike was hammered into the ground") as well as metaphoric sentences ("The army was hammered in the battle"). Verbs such as 'hammered' may be homonyms, with separate meanings belonging to the literal action and metaphoric action, or they may be polysemous, with the metaphoric sense grounded in the literal sense. We investigated the time course of the effects of single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to primary motor cortex on literal and metaphoric sentence comprehension. Stimulation 300 ms post-verb presentation impaired comprehension of both literal and metaphoric sentences, supporting a causal role of sensory-motor areas in comprehension. Results suggest that the literal meaning of an action verb remains activated during metaphor comprehension, even after the temporal window of homonym disambiguation. This suggests that such verbs are polysemous, and both senses are related and grounded in motor cortex.

The N1-N2-LPC Pattern in Processing Advertising Pictorial Metaphors: An ERP Study

We investigated what the temporal processing is of advertising pictorial metaphors. After presenting “a word of product” and “its advertising pictures,” the experiment instructed participants to make a follow-up true–false judgment considering what the picture intended to suggest. A repeated-measures ANOVAs for a 2 (picture type: metaphor, non-metaphor) × 2 (prime–target condition: congruent, incongruent) × 3 (electrode site: Fz, Cz, Pz) experimental condition was conducted on three components, N1 (100–150 ms), N2 (200–300 ms), and LPC (400–600 ms and 600–1,000 ms). The results show that metaphor pictures elicited larger amplitude in N1 (broadly distributed), N2 (frontally biased) and LPC (parietally biased), roughly reflecting an entire process with an initial response to visual onsets, an early recognition of semantic violations and a prolonged reanalysis process of semantic integration. We argue that, different than verbal metaphors, this faster processing occurred due to the involvement of visual pathway.

Creative Argumentation: When and Why People Commit the Metaphoric Fallacy

This article aims to understand when and why people accept fallacious arguments featuring metaphors (metaphoric fallacy) as sound arguments. Two experiments were designed to investigate, respectively, when and why participants fell into the metaphoric fallacy. In the first experiment, participants were provided with a series of syllogisms, presented in natural language, containing in their first premise either a lexically ambiguous, literal middle term or a metaphorical middle term, i.e. the term that "bridges" the first premise with the second premise, and ending with a true, false or plausible conclusion. For each argument they were asked to evaluate whether the conclusion followed from the premises. Results show that the metaphoric fallacy is harder to detect in case of arguments with plausible conclusion with a conventional metaphor rather than a novel metaphor as middle term. The second experiment investigated why participants considered the metaphoric fallacy with plausible conclusion as a strong argument. Results suggest that participants' belief in the conclusion of the argument, independent from the premises, is a predictor for committing the metaphoric fallacy. We argue that a creative search for alternative reasons justifies participants' falling into the metaphoric fallacy, especially when the framing effect of a metaphor covertly influences the overall reading of the argument. Thus, far from being a source of irrationality, metaphors might elicit a different style of reasoning in argumentation, forcing participants to find an alternative interpretation of the premises that guarantees the believed conclusion. In this process, conventional metaphors are revitalized and extended through the second premise to the conclusion, thereby entailing an overall metaphorical reading of the argument.

The Role of Context in Processing Chinese Three-Character Verb-Object Metaphors: An Event-Related Potential Study

Whether and how context plays a role in metaphor processing remains a controversial issue. One major theory on metaphor comprehension, the graded salience hypothesis (GSH) model, emphasizes salience as the key factor determining the precedence of semantic access. Using event-related potential technique, the present study examined Chinese metaphors to investigate whether the salient meaning is always processed first regardless of context. The experiment employed a Prime-Target-Probe paradigm. Three-character Chinese verb-object metaphors were used as the Target proceeded by one of the three contexts (the Prime): (1) metaphorical context priming the Target's metaphorical meaning, (2) literal context priming the Target's literal meaning, and (3) irrelevant context as the control condition. The Target was then followed by the Probe, which was always related to the Target (except in the filler condition). Forty participants were asked to judge whether the Target and the following Probe were semantically related. The N400 elicited by the Target showed no contextual effect. The N400 amplitude elicited by the Probe was smaller in the metaphorical priming condition compared with the literal priming condition, while the N400 in the irrelevant control condition was between the other two conditions, demonstrating a clear context effect. In addition, an unexpected P240 component also showed the similar graded pattern. Our results mostly support the GSH model, indicating that the salient meaning invariantly gets activated first before the activation of the nonsalient meaning at the lexical access stage. However, context does play a role in a parallel way either facilitating or suppressing this interpretation in the latter meaning integration stage.

Sentence-Level Effects of Literary Genre: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

The current study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures to examine effects of genre awareness on sentence processing and evaluation. We hypothesized that genre awareness modulates effects of genre-typical manipulations. We manipulated instructions between participants, either specifying a genre (poetry) or not (neutral). Sentences contained genre-typical variations of semantic congruency (congruent/incongruent) and morpho-phonological features (archaic/contemporary inflections). Offline ratings of meaningfulness (n = 64/group) showed higher average ratings for semantically incongruent sentences in the poetry vs. neutral condition. ERPs during sentence reading (n = 24/group; RSVP presentation at a fixed per-constituent rate; probe task) showed a left-lateralized N400-like effect for contemporary vs. archaic inflections. Semantic congruency elicited a bilateral posterior N400 effect for incongruent vs. congruent continuations followed by a centro-parietal positivity (P600). While N400 amplitudes were insensitive to the genre, the latency of the P600 was delayed by the poetry instruction. From these results, we conclude that during real-time sentence comprehension, readers are sensitive to subtle morphological manipulations and the implicit prosodic differences that accompany them. By contrast, genre awareness affects later stages of comprehension.

Finding features, figuratively

Object concepts refer to unique clusters of properties that can be selectively activated or inhibited depending on what information is currently relevant. This conceptual "stretching" enables limitless new meanings to be generated, and figurative language provides a useful framework in which to study this conceptual flexibility. Here we probe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension of novel metaphors as a means of understanding the conceptual flexibility inherent to language processing more generally. We show that novel metaphor comprehension involves the activation or inhibition of conceptual properties that are either relevant or irrelevant to the metaphor, and that left inferior frontal gyrus is recruited in this process, supporting a role for this region in the fine-tuning of conceptual meaning. Our results are consistent with a flexible, compositional account of conceptual structure in which semantic control mechanisms operate over conceptual properties during figurative language comprehension in order to create context-dependent meaning.

On understanding creative language: The late positive complex and novel metaphor comprehension

Novel metaphoric sentences have repeatedly evoked larger N400 amplitudes than literal sentences, while investigations of the late positive complex (LPC) have brought inconsistent results, with reports of both increased and reduced amplitudes. In two experiments, we examined novel metaphor comprehension in Polish, using the same set of literal, novel metaphoric, and anomalous sentences. The first aim of the study was to test whether novel metaphors would evoke larger or smaller late positivity complex (LPC) amplitudes compared to literal and anomalous sentences. Some earlier studies have shown that whether increased LPC amplitudes are observed or not may be related to the task participants are asked to perform, with explicit acceptability judgments being more likely to evoke the LPC effect. The second aim of the study was, thus, to test whether the observed LPC pattern would be the same across two tasks, the semantic decision task (Experiment 1) and the reading task (Experiment 2). Our results replicated the N400 effect observed in earlier studies on metaphor in both experiments. Most importantly, a reduction in late positivity to novel metaphors relative to anomalous sentences was found in both experiments. Additionally, this difference was broadly distributed over parietal sites in Experiment 1, and clearly left-lateralized in Experiment 2, which might imply differences in the involvement of recollection and semantic processes. Overall, these results seem to indicate that both conventionality and task demands modulate the LPC pattern.

ERP Evidence for the Activation of Syntactic Structure During Comprehension of Lexical Idiom

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the syntactic structure was activated in the comprehension of lexical idioms, and if so, whether it varied as a function of familiarity and semantic transparency. Participants were asked to passively read the "1+2" structural Chinese lexical idioms with each being presented following 3-5 contextual "1+2" (congruent-structure condition) or "2+1" structural Chinese phrases (incongruent-structure condition). The N400 ERP responses showed more positivity in congruent-structure condition relative to incongruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity and high semantic transparency, but less positivity in congruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity but low semantic transparency, idioms with low familiarity but high semantic transparency, and idioms with low familiarity and low semantic transparency. Our results suggest that syntactic structure, as the unnecessarity of lexical idiomatic words, was nevertheless activated, independent of familiarity and semantic transparency.

Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study

A large body of electrophysiological literature showed that metaphor comprehension elicits two different event-related brain potential responses, namely the so-called N400 and P600 components. Yet most of these studies test metaphor in isolation while in natural conversation metaphors do not come out of the blue but embedded in linguistic and extra-linguistic context. This study aimed at assessing the role of context in the metaphor comprehension process. We recorded EEG activity while participants were presented with metaphors and equivalent literal expressions in a minimal context (Experiment 1) and in a supportive context where the word expressing the ground between the metaphor's topic and vehicle was made explicit (Experiment 2). The N400 effect was visible only in minimal context, whereas the P600 was visible both in the absence and in the presence of contextual cues. These findings suggest that the N400 observed for metaphor is related to contextual aspects, possibly indexing contextual expectations on upcoming words that guide lexical access and retrieval, while the P600 seems to reflect truly pragmatic interpretative processes needed to make sense of a metaphor and derive the speaker's meaning, also in the presence of contextual cues. In sum, previous information in the linguistic context biases toward a metaphorical interpretation but does not suppress interpretative pragmatic mechanisms to establish the intended meaning.

Metonymy as Referential Dependency: Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Arguments for a Unified Linguistic Treatment

We examine metonymy at psycho- and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations (one- vs. two-mechanism). We compare highly conventionalized systematic metonymy (producer-for-product: "All freshmen read O'Connell") to lesser-conventionalized circumstantial metonymy ("[a waitress says to another:] 'Table 2 asked for more coffee."'). Whereas these two metonymy types differ in terms of contextual demands, they each reveal a similar dependency between the named and intended conceptual entities (e.g., Jackendoff, 1997; Nunberg, 1979, 1995). We reason that if each metonymy yields a distinct processing time course and substantially non-overlapping preferential localization pattern, it would not only support a two-mechanism view (one lexical, one pragmatic) but would suggest that conventionalization acts as a linguistic categorizer. By contrast, a similar behavior in time course and localization would support a one-mechanism view and the inference that conventionalization acts instead as a modulator of contextual felicitousness, and that differences in interpretation introduced by conventionalization are of degree, not of kind. Results from three paradigms: self-paced reading (SPR), event-related potentials (ERP), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), reveal the following: no main effect by condition (metonymy vs. matched literal control) for either metonymy type immediately after the metonymy trigger, and a main effect for only the Circumstantial metonymy one word post-trigger (SPR); a N400 effect across metonymy types and a late positivity for Circumstantial metonymy (ERP); and a highly overlapping activation connecting the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (fMRI). Altogether, the pattern observed does not reach the threshold required to justify a two-mechanism system. Instead, the pattern is more naturally (and conservatively) understood as resulting from the implementation of a generalized referential dependency mechanism, modulated by degree of context dependence/conventionalization, thus supporting architectures of language whereby "lexical" and "pragmatic" meaning relations are encoded along a cline of contextual underspecification.

A dataset of metaphors from the italian literature: exploring psycholinguistic variables and the role of context

Defining the specific role of the factors that affect metaphor processing is a fundamental step for fully understanding figurative language comprehension, either in discourse and conversation or in reading poems and novels. This study extends the currently available materials on everyday metaphorical expressions by providing the first dataset of metaphors extracted from literary texts and scored for the major psycholinguistic variables, considering also the effect of context. A set of 115 Italian literary metaphors presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and a subset of 65 literary metaphors embedded in their original texts (Experiment 2) were rated on several dimensions (word and phrase frequency, readability, cloze probability, familiarity, concreteness, difficulty and meaningfulness). Overall, literary metaphors scored around medium-low values on all dimensions in both experiments. Collected data were subjected to correlation analysis, which showed the presence of a strong cluster of variables-mainly familiarity, difficulty, and meaningfulness-when literary metaphor were presented in isolation. A weaker cluster was observed when literary metaphors were presented in the original contexts, with familiarity no longer correlating with meaningfulness. Context manipulation influenced familiarity, concreteness and difficulty ratings, which were lower in context than out of context, while meaningfulness increased. Throughout the different dimensions, the literary context seems to promote a global interpretative activity that enhances the open-endedness of the metaphor as a semantic structure constantly open to all possible interpretations intended by the author and driven by the text. This dataset will be useful for the design of future experimental studies both on literary metaphor and on the role of context in figurative meaning, combining ecological validity and aesthetic aspects of language.