Abstract
Many figurative expressions are fully conventionalized in everyday speech. Regarding the neural basis of figurative language processing, research has predominantly focused on metaphoric expressions in minimal semantic context. It remains unclear in how far metaphoric expressions during continuous text comprehension activate similar neural networks as isolated metaphors. We therefore investigated the processing of similes (figurative language, e.g., “He smokes like a chimney!”) occurring in a short story. Sixteen healthy, male, native German speakers listened to similes that came about naturally in a short story, while blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). For the event-related analysis, similes were contrasted with non-figurative control sentences (CS). The stimuli differed with respect to figurativeness, while they were matched for frequency of words, number of syllables, plausibility, and comprehensibility. Similes contrasted with CS resulted in enhanced BOLD responses in the left inferior (IFG) and adjacent middle frontal gyrus. Concrete CS as compared to similes activated the bilateral middle temporal gyri as well as the right precuneus and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). Activation of the left IFG for similes in a short story is consistent with results on single sentence metaphor processing. The findings strengthen the importance of the left inferior frontal region in the processing of abstract figurative speech during continuous, ecologically-valid speech comprehension; the processing of concrete semantic contents goes along with a down-regulation of bilateral temporal regions.
Highlights
Figurative expressions are an established part of everyday speech and are often fully conventionalized
The current study focuses on the processing of figurative speech in form of similes such as “The sun is like the eye of heaven” in a natural context without constraining instructions or predetermined cognitive tasks, e.g., decision tasks; asking the participants to press a button, when either abstract or concrete content was presented
Local maxima were found in both regions, though BOLD responses for the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were stronger (Table 1)
Summary
Figurative expressions are an established part of everyday speech and are often fully conventionalized. Figurative speech use goes far beyond the concept of a mere stylistic device and can be seen as an integral part of day-to-day communication. It remains unclear in how far the comprehension of figurative speech draws on additional resources when presented in a naturally-evolving continuous and coherent story. Context and conventionalization may facilitate comprehension (for idiom comprehension see Gibbs, 1992) and neural activation of contextualized similes might not differ from non-simile sentences
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