Figurative Language Comprehension Research Articles

Figurative language production in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.

Background and AimsChildren with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) without intellectual disability often face challenges in understanding written text. However, considerable variability in this area underscores the need to examine their reading profiles and the factors influencing the development of reading comprehension (RC). This study investigates the RC of upper elementary school children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) peers and explores the role of broader linguistic abilities in RC, with a specific focus on pragmatic competence (e.g., figurative language comprehension). Nonlinguistic factors such as age and nonverbal cognitive capacity are also considered. A secondary aim is to assess the potential heterogeneity in RC and linguistic abilities within the ASD sample.MethodsIn total, 35 children with ASD and 35 TD controls (mean age = 10.7 years, SD = 0.97) were matched for age, gender, and nonverbal cognitive ability using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. Both groups completed assessments of RC, structural language skills (receptive vocabulary and morphosyntax), and figurative language competence. To evaluate variability, the ASD group was divided into two subgroups based on RC performance.ResultsParticipants with ASD scored significantly lower than their TD peers in RC, morphosyntactic skills, and figurative language comprehension, but no significant differences were observed in receptive vocabulary. For children with ASD, chronological age, nonverbal cognitive ability, and receptive vocabulary accounted for significant variance in RC. In contrast, RC in TD children was predicted by morphosyntactic ability and figurative competence. Furthermore, the substantial heterogeneity within the ASD group was evident, highlighting their variability across the range of examined variables.Conclusions and ImplicationsThe findings indicate that children with ASD as a group experience notable difficulties in text comprehension and language processing at the morphosyntactic and pragmatic levels, despite achieving receptive vocabulary and nonverbal cognitive scores comparable to those of their TD peers. The two groups appear to employ distinct strategies for deriving meaning from text. The pronounced variability in RC and linguistic abilities among ASD participants underscores the complexity of their reading and language profiles, highlighting the importance of tailored educational assessments and interventions, which are further discussed.

This qualitative action research case study explored how a blended literacy learning intervention combining the flipped classroom model with youth-selected multimodal texts influenced sixth-grade Academic Intervention Services (AIS) students’ comprehension of figurative language. The study was conducted over four months in a New York State middle school and involved seven students identified as at-risk readers. Initially, students engaged with teacher-created instructional videos outside of class and completed analytical activities during class time. However, due to low engagement and limited comprehension gains, the intervention was revised to incorporate student autonomy through the selection of multimodal texts such as graphic novels, song lyrics, and YouTube videos. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, journal entries, surveys, and classroom artifacts, and then analyzed using inductive coding and member checking. Findings indicate that students demonstrated increased the comprehension of figurative language when given choice in both texts and instructional videos. Participants reported increased motivation, deeper engagement, and enhanced meaning-making, particularly when reading texts that reflected their personal interests and experiences. The study concludes that a blended literacy model emphasizing autonomy and multimodality can support comprehension and bridge the gap between in-school and out-of-school literacy practices.

Figurative language - metaphors, similes, idioms, and other non-literal expressions - is a cornerstone of human communication, playing a crucial role in literature, rhetoric, and everyday conversation. Teaching figurative linguistics involves not only explaining the mechanics behind these expressions but also engaging students in the creative, interpretative, and analytical processes that bring language to life. This article explores effective teaching methods and approaches for incorporating figurative linguistics into the classroom. This article examines contemporary teaching methods in figurative linguistics, presenting innovative strategies and approaches aimed at enhancing learners' comprehension and use of figurative language. The primary goal is to explore and evaluate effective pedagogical techniques that bridge theoretical insights with practical classroom applications. This article investigates the comparative stylistics of figurative language as employed by Kazakh writers in contrast with their foreign counterparts. By analyzing a range of literary texts, the study identifies and categorizes various types of figurative expressions, exploring both their semantic functions and stylistic nuances. The research employs a qualitative methodology, including close reading and thematic analysis, to examine how cultural and historical contexts shape the use of metaphors, similes, idioms, and other figurative devices. Findings reveal significant differences and similarities in the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of figurative language, highlighting the unique literary strategies within Kazakh literature while also situating them within a broader global discourse. This comparative approach not only enriches our understanding of stylistic choices in literature but also underscores the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and literary expression.

ABSTRACT Lack of abstract thinking, known as concretism, is a well-known psychopathological feature of schizophrenia, reflecting the tendency to adhere to concrete aspects of stimuli and figurative language comprehension difficulties. Inspired by the similarity between ‘concretism’ as defined in psychopathology and ‘concreteness’ as defined in linguistics, namely a semantic dimension linked to perceptual experience, we tested the novel hypothesis that impairment in deriving figurative meanings is related to impairment at the semantic level, involving concreteness. We analysed speech samples from 63 individuals with schizophrenia and 47 controls, who were asked to verbalise the meaning of idioms, metaphors, and proverbs. By automatically extracting linguistic features from speech, we observed that answers in the schizophrenia group exhibited higher word concreteness and the related measure of word imageability, especially in proverbs, while not differing from controls’ ones in lexical richness and speech-time composition. Concreteness in verbalisations produced by individuals with schizophrenia negatively predicted their ability to understand proverbs and their global pragmatic and cognitive profile. This study supports the idea that concretism is rooted in semantics, linking the tendency to concrete figurative interpretations and a bias towards concrete words. In this view, impairment in figurative language understanding can be seen as a difficulty in abstracting away from perceptual-related properties associated with linguistic inputs, in the broader context of multisensory integration disruption. The study discloses new areas of interest for the automated analysis of speech in psychosis, pointing to the importance of considering concreteness for better characterising linguistic profiles and identifying clinically relevant linguistic dimensions.

Brain asymmetries in figurative language comprehension.

This systematic review examines the impact of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) on English language teaching (ELT), aiming to elucidate how CMT enhances understanding, retention, and application of complex linguistic structures in various educational contexts. The study adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA) guidelines, involving a thorough screening and evaluation of 14 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2024. These articles were selected from diverse educational settings, including university-level courses, refugee education centers, and professional development workshops. Data were collected and analyzed to assess the effectiveness of CMT in improving language proficiency. The review found that CMT significantly enhances students' comprehension and use of figurative language, improves writing proficiency, and aids in understanding discipline-specific terminologies in fields such as psychology and economics. Additionally, CMT was shown to increase cognitive accessibility, leading to better problem-solving skills and higher student engagement by effectively linking classroom learning to real-world applications. The study highlights CMT’s role in fostering both perceptual and conceptual learning, crucial for advanced language proficiency and the transfer of concepts across cultural and linguistic barriers. This review provides valuable insights for educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers, demonstrating the benefits of integrating CMT into ELT curricula. By adopting CMT-based teaching approaches, educational institutions can enhance cognitive development, linguistic abilities, and intercultural competence among learners.

Background/Objectives: Figurative language is a central tool for enriching spoken and written languages, and it is important for building social relationships. Difficulties in figurative language understanding may impair social adjustment. Some studies have found more gaps in the understanding of irony and idioms among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to those of their peers with typical development (TD). To date, no studies have examined the relationship between the ability to understand social situations (as a separate ability) and the ability to understand irony and idioms. The present study examined the roles of theory of mind (ToM) and social situation understanding in the comprehension of idioms and ironic criticism. Methods: The current study included 58 participants aged 8-11, including 28 children with high-functioning ASD and 30 children with TD matched by age, gender, and nonverbal intelligence. All the participants completed a ToM questionnaire that assesses their understanding of others' intentions, as well as a questionnaire pertaining to their comprehension of social situations, ironic criticism, and idioms. Results: TD children outperformed the autistic children in idiom and irony understanding, as well as in ToM and social situation understanding. Understanding social situations and ToM contributed to idiom and irony understanding, with ToM ability uniquely contributing to irony (but not to idiom) understanding. Path analysis revealed that social cognitive abilities mediated the link between group affiliation and vocabulary, affecting figurative language comprehension. Conclusions: The present study demonstrates that social cognition skills influence the ability to understand ironic criticism and idioms, mediating the association between vocabulary and figurative language comprehension.

Abstract Early research on the first language acquisition of figurative language indicated that figurative language comprehension and production skills develop relatively late, while recent studies contest this view. This study explores early production of metaphorical (e.g., shark meaning a rapacious crafty person) and metonymic (e.g., house meaning an organisation) meanings in English polysemous nouns and verbs by using the Braunwald corpus, which tracks a single child’s speech from the age of 1 year, 5 months to 7 years. We explore the initial production of these meanings, with respect to the age, order of acquisition and part of speech (noun vs. verb). Our study shows that children start using figurative meanings at a much earlier age than previously thought. In this early stage, metonymic meanings emerge earlier, while metaphorical meanings come a few months later. These findings challenge prior beliefs that children only develop figurative language skills at 3 years of age and show that it is not only the pre-figurative skills that develop early but also the production of very conventional types of figurative meaning, which might not necessarily require the completed development of the complex set of cognitive skills necessary for cross-domain comparison.

The aim of the present study has been to investigate reading comprehension (RC) of children with specific learning difficulties (SLD), considering linguistic factors, such as receptive vocabulary, morphosyntax, and pragmatics (i.e., figurative language). Participants included 90 students (9–12 years old; Μyears = 10.8, SD = 0.95), 45 with SLD and 45 typically developing (TD) controls, matched on age, gender, and non-verbal cognitive ability. Results indicated that students with SLD had significantly lower performance on RC and across all linguistic measures compared to TD peers. Scores of the figurative language comprehension task predicted RC for TD children, whereas morphosyntactic ability emerged as a unique predictor of RC for SLD children. The two groups utilize distinct linguistic resources in their effort to extract meaning from written texts. The differentiated language profile of children with SLD suggests the implementation of differentiated educational assessment and intervention practices, which are discussed.

Given that the use and comprehension of figurative language is one of the most intriguing abilities of the mind, this study extends the line of research related to the process of understanding figurative language to individual differences. The starting assumption is that individual differences affect our ability to understand figurative language, focusing on fluid and crystallized intelligence. These types of intelligence were measured in relation to the ability t1o understand metaphors, and their influence was investigated indirectly, through tests that reliably examine both types of intelligence. The research investigates non-literary metaphors in the Serbian language, normed according to the following dimensions: metaphoricity, aptness, and familiarity. This study seeks to show whether and to what extent fluid and/or crystallized intelligence influence the process of understanding non-literary metaphors normed according to different features. Through selected verbal and non-verbal tests, Raven’s progressive matrices (Raven, 1938), semantic similarities test (Stamenković, Ichien, & Holyoak, 2019a), as well as a non-literary metaphor comprehension test, it is determined in which way fluid and crystallized intelligence play roles in the process of metaphor comprehension, as well as which possible cognitive mechanism allows us to process metaphors. The results show that the comprehension of non-literary metaphors mostly relies on crystallized intelligence, while fluid intelligence seems to be employed in individual cases, only with some groups of metaphors.

Compound figures of speech, such as hyperbolic metaphors, ironic metaphors and ironic hyperboles, have been investigated from several points of view, but the complexity of the phenomena is such that a thorough explanation is still lacking. This contribution will be focused on ironic metaphors. It will be suggested that a plausible explanation of their process of interpretation can be found within the framework of Conceptual Integration Networks. Specifically, two alternative proposals are discussed. The first one is in line with two-stage theories of figurative language comprehension, as it describes the interpretation of the compound as a blending of a blending. The second one analyses emergent meanings on a probabilistic base, as in constraint-satisfaction models of irony, which are consistent with one-stage theories. Finally, an interpretation of the empirical results obtained in previous studies is provided.

The study aimed to investigate the allocation of figurative language comprehension (FLC) within the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model of cognitive abilities, using three newly developed tests: the Reverse Paraphrase Test (RPT), the Literal Paraphrase Test (LPT), and the Proverb Test (PT). The analysis of a sample of 909 participants revealed that the RPT and LPT measured a unidimensional construct of FLC, while the PT was excluded due to insufficient fit. Combining RPT and LPT items, various models were evaluated, with a bifactor S-1 model showing the best fit, indicating the influence of a general factor (representing FLC) and test-specific method factors. The study explored FLC allocation within the CHC model, supporting its consideration as a distinct factor under the g factor. Examining the nomological network, significant correlations emerged between the Intellectual Curiosity and Aesthetic Sensitivity facets of Openness and FLC, which were comparable in size to the relation with general ability. In conclusion, the study enhances the understanding of FLC within the CHC model, advocating its recognition as a distinct factor. Correlations with Openness facets suggest valuable insights into the interplay between cognitive abilities and personality, necessitating further research for a deeper exploration of this relation.

ABSTRACT The use and interpretation of figurative expressions (e.g., irony, idiom, and metaphor) is an integral part of everyday human communication. Thus, the ability to comprehend figurative language underpins successful communication and social functioning. Despite this, there is an ongoing debate regarding the fundamental cognitive and neural processes that support figurative language comprehension. In addition, relatively little is known regarding the additional challenges that can be faced in many situations, for example, when communicating in one’s second language, or with partners from a different culture, or when integrating information across different modalities. The purpose of this special issue is to showcase some of the latest research in this area, utilizing state of the art methods to examine comprehension (e.g., eye-tracking and EEG) and investigating how certain factors, such as cultural and individual differences and multimodal stimuli affect the comprehension process.

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non-literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD.

On the specificity of figurative language comprehension impairment in schizophrenia and its relation to cognitive skills but not psychopathological symptoms - Study on metaphor, humor and irony

The comprehension of metaphor, a vivid and figurative language, is a complex endeavor requiring cooperation among multiple cognitive systems. There are still many important questions regarding neural mechanisms implicated in specific types of metaphor. To address these questions, we conducted activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses on 30 studies (containing data of 480 participants) and meta-analytic connectivity modeling analyses. First, the results showed that metaphor comprehension engaged the inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus-all in the left hemisphere. In addition to the commonly reported networks of language and attention, metaphor comprehension engaged networks of visual. Second, sub-analysis showed that the contextual complexity can modulate figurativeness, with the convergence on the left fusiform gyrus during metaphor comprehension at discourse-level. Especially, right hemisphere only showed convergence in studies of novel metaphors, suggesting that the right hemisphere is more associated with difficulty than metaphorical. The work here extends knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying metaphor comprehension in individual brain regions and neural networks.

Abstract Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential order for an under-studied type of construction: German verb–object metaphors. In two visual-world, eye-tracking experiments, we manipulated whether a discourse context biased a spoken target utterance toward a metaphoric or a literal interpretation. We also manipulated the order of verb and object in the target utterances (e.g., Stefan interviewt eine Hyäne, ‘Stefan interviews a hyena’, verb→object; and Stefan wird eine Hyäne interviewen, ‘Stefan will a hyena interview’, object→verb). Experiment 1 shows that contextual cues interacted with sequential order, mediating the processing of verb–object metaphors: When the context biased toward a metaphoric interpretation, participants readily understood the object metaphorically for the verb→object sequence, whereas they likely first understood it literally for the object→verb sequence. Crucially, no such effect of sequential order was found when context biased toward a literal interpretation. Experiment 2 suggests that differences in processing found in Experiment 1 were brought on by the interaction of discourse context and sequential order and not by sequential order alone. We propose ways in which existing theoretical views could be extended to account for these findings. Overall, our study shows the importance of context during figurative language comprehension and highlights the need to test the predictions of metaphor theories on non-English and non-nominal metaphors.

Abstract Very little is known about the processes underlying second language (L2) speakers’ understanding of written metaphors and similes. Moreover, most of the theories on figurative language comprehension do not consider reader-related factors. In the study, we used eye-tracking to examine how native Finnish speakers (N = 63) read written English nominal metaphors (“education is a stairway”) and similes (“education is like a stairway”). Identical topic–vehicle pairs were used in both conditions. After reading, participants evaluated familiarity of each pair. English proficiency was measured using the Bilingual-language Profile Questionnaire and the Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English. The results showed that readers were more likely to regress within metaphors than within similes, indicating that processing metaphors requires more processing effort than processing similes. The familiarity of a metaphor and L2 English proficiency modulated this effect. The results are discussed in the light of current theories on figurative language processing.

The impact of transparency on hemispheric lateralization of idiom comprehension: An rTMS study