Surfing the brainwaves of metaphor comprehension

Abstract

Researching metaphor can be approached from various perspectives. Psycholinguistic views offer insight into how metaphoric expressions are comprehended during online tasks and whether online metaphor comprehension differs from literal language understanding. Early psycholinguistic studies used reaction time methods, which allowed researchers to investigate the time course and verify existing theories of figurative language comprehension. However, reaction time studies are somewhat limited in showing differences that occur within the same or comparable time frame. In this regard, electrophysiological methods seem to be more informative. Event-related potential studies report differences between metaphoric and literal language comprehension that occur as early as 200 ms (P200) after the presentation of the critical word. They also show that ERP components like the N400 or LPC are modulated by the degree of conventionality and metaphoricity. Finally, source localization methods allow researchers to identify the neural generators of these components. These results show that the neurophysiological perspective offers yet another way of looking at metaphor, which can broaden our understanding of many aspects related to figurative language comprehension.

To electrify bilingualism: Electrophysiological insights into bilingual metaphor comprehension

“…In addition to its sensitivity to syntactic violations [ 34 – 36 ], late positivity is also modulated by semantic expectancy, semantic incongruencies on the sentence and discourse levels, and conceptual complexity of sentences [ 17 , 37 – 40 ]. This suggests that the LPC also reflects cognitive mechanisms engaged in meaning construction and revision, with the robustness of the LPC effect indexing the effort involved in these operations, as well as additional working memory processes necessary during meaning integration [ 41 – 43 ].…”

Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study

“…When the event-related potential (ERP) electrophysiological technique started to be used to investigate how metaphor comprehension unfolds over time, the issue of the processing steps was revived in terms of ERP components (Bambini and Resta, 2012 ; Rataj, 2014 ). Two components have been commonly reported for metaphors, namely a centro-parietal negativity (N400) and a later parietal positivity (P600/LPC) (Pynte et al, 1996 ; Coulson and Van Petten, 2002 ; De Grauwe et al, 2010 ; Schmidt-Snoek et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Globally, studies with a biphasic pattern or a later effect tend to favor the indirect view, while studies focusing on the N400 argue against the indirect model. In addition, one important result evidenced in the literature is that the ERP components elicited by metaphor are modulated by the degree of conventionality of the expression, also known as familiarity (Rataj, 2014 ). For instance, novel metaphors seem to elicit larger N400 amplitude than conventional metaphors (Arzouan et al, 2007a ; Lai et al, 2009 ), which might suggest an indirect access for the formers and a direct access for the latters, in line with the Graded Salience Hypothesis.…”

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

“…Due to its recent adoption in marketing, research on visual metaphors in advertising by applying neuroscientific techniques is still scarce (Bambini et al, 2016). The studies on this matter are mainly focused on the analysis of textual metaphors and are mostly restricted to semantic processing (Sotillo et al, 2004;Lachaud, 2013;Rataj, 2014).…”