Can clouds dance? Part 2: An ERP investigation of passive conceptual expansion

The temporal dynamics underlying the comprehension of scientific metaphors and poetic metaphors

“…Consistent with our predictions of the N400, although there was a graded effect of the four experimental conditions on the N400 amplitude with both novel metaphors resulting in the most negative waveform as reported by several other studies Lai et al, 2009;Rutter et al, 2012;Schneider et al, 2014), scientific metaphors and poetic metaphors did not differ significantly from each other. Taken together with the claim that the N400 component indexes higher-level integrative processes in priming studies (Brown et al, 2000;Tzuyin Lai and Curran, 2013), similar N400 amplitudes for scientific metaphors and poetic metaphors in the current study can be seen as similar efforts to establish a connection between the two semantically distant concepts conveyed through the stimuli.…”

“…Such a late negativity has been previously reported for sentence processing with novel metaphors (Arzouan et al, 2007a(Arzouan et al, , 2007bGoldstein et al, 2012;Rutter et al, 2012), reflecting secondary semantic integration processes. The sustained negativity is conceived of as a reinterpretation process after an initial failure to reach meaning (Jiang et al, 2009).…”

“…and on retrieval cues provided by immediate and discourse context (Kutas et al, 2006). Increased N400 amplitudes have repeatedly been reported for novel metaphors compared to conventional metaphors and literal expressions (Arzouan et al, 2007a;Grauwe et al, 2010;Lai et al, 2009;Rutter et al, 2012). The graded N400 difference suggests that processing difficulty associated with figurative language is related to the complexity of the underlying mapping and integration operations.…”

Surfing the brainwaves of metaphor comprehension

“…The main finding reported in several studies thus far is that metaphoric utterances evoke larger N400 amplitudes than literal language (Pynte et al 1996;Coulson and Van Petten 2002;Coulson and Van Petten 2007;Tartter 2002;Arzouan 2007a, Arzouan 2007bLai et al 2009). Moreover, conventionality has been shown to influence the N400 amplitudes in that a graded effect has been observed with lowest N400 amplitudes for literal utterances, larger for conventional metaphoric and the largest for novel metaphoric utterances (Coulson and Van Petten 2002;Arzouan 2007b;Rutter et al 2012). Nevertheless, the interpretation of the N400 effect is somewhat complex.…”

“…This was examined by Rutter et al (2012), who recorded the EEG signal while participants read novel metaphoric, literal and anomalous sentences. As the two defining features of creativity are originality (unusualness) and relevance (appropriateness), they defined the stimuli on these two aspects, so that the materials consisted of highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphoric), highly unusual and low appropriate (anomalous), as well as low unusual and highly appropriate (literal) sentences.…”