Neural correlates of metaphor processing: The roles of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty

Abstract

There is currently much interest in investigating the neural substrates of metaphor processing. In particular, it has been suggested that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the comprehension of figurative (non-literal) language, and in particular metaphors. However, some studies find no evidence of right hemisphere involvement in metaphor comprehension (e.g. Lee & Dapretto, 2006; Rapp et al., 2004). We suggest that lateralization differences between literal and metaphorical language may be due to factors such as differences in familiarity (Schmidt et al., 2007), or difficulty (Bookheimer, 2002; Rapp et al., 2004) in addition to figurativeness. The purpose of this study was to separate the effects of figurativeness, familiarity, and difficulty on the recruitment of neural systems involved in language, in particular right hemisphere mechanisms. This was achieved by comparing neural activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) between four conditions: literal sentences, familiar and easy to understand metaphors, unfamiliar and easy to understand metaphors, and unfamiliar and difficult to understand metaphors. Metaphors recruited the right insula, left temporal pole and right inferior frontal gyrus in comparison with literal sentences. Familiar metaphors recruited the right middle frontal gyrus when contrasted with unfamiliar metaphors. Easy metaphors showed higher activation in the left middle frontal gyrus as compared to difficult metaphors, while difficult metaphors showed selective activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus as compared to easy metaphors. We conclude that the right hemisphere is involved in metaphor processing and that the factors of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty are important in determining neural recruitment of semantic processing.

Neural correlates of Korean proverb processing: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…It is known that difficult metaphor activates left IFG rather than easy metaphor (Schmidt & Seger, 2009), but the control of difficulty was not complete in our present study. The concreteness of the proverb may be different from the literal sentence, which may be a confounding factor, but it was difficult to control because of the inherent differences between proverb and literal sentence (Lai, van Dam, Conant, Binder, & Desai, 2015).…”

“…To date, a few studies have reported a crucial role of the RH in interpreting metaphors (Anaki, Faust, & Kravetz, 1998; Bottini et al., 1994; Schmidt & Seger, 2009). In neuropsychology, it is widely accepted that the RH plays a special role in the processing of idiomatic expressions (Van Lancker & Kempler, 1987).…”

Does the mental lexicon exist?

“…However, if we assume the lexicon to contain all linguistic information, then it is necessary to account for a wide distributed network in the brain: the classic Broca and Wernick areas, visual form area (DEHAENE, 2012) for written language, right hemisphere regions for coarse semantic coding (BEEMAN; CHIARELLO, 1998), discourse processing (SCHERER, 2009;MASON;JUST 2006) and pragmatics (SCHMIDT;SEGER, 2009;SAXE, 2006;BAMBINI, 2010), etc. Looking from this point of view, the mental lexicon seems to be more a theory apparatus created to explain language processing, rather than a real structure.…”

O que a Neurociência tem a nos dizer (ou ainda não) sobre o processamento da metáfora?

“…Houve também referência à ativação de parte do sistema límbico, em especial, do giro parahipocampal (MASHAL et al, 2005;SCHMIDT;SEGER, 2009;YANG et al, 2009;DIAZ et al, 2011), cuja ativação é associada a atividades que requerem processamento de ambiguidades no nível da sentença.…”