Comprehension Of Novel Metaphors Research Articles

An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making.

Neuroimaging studies show that metaphors activate sensorimotor areas. These findings were interpreted as metaphors contributing to conceptual thought by mapping concrete, somatosensory information onto abstract ideas. But is sensorimotor information a necessary constituent of figurative meaning? The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a divided visual field paradigm with healthy adults to explore the role of sensorimotor feature processing in the comprehension of novel metaphors via the electrophysiological concreteness effect. Participants read French, novel adjective-noun expressions that were either metaphorical (“fat sentence”) or literal (“fat hip”). While literal expressions evoked a typical concreteness effect, an enhanced frontal negativity during right hemisphere (RH) as opposed to left hemisphere (LH) presentation, metaphors showed no such sign of sensorimotor feature processing. Relative to literals, they evoked a sustained frontal negativity during LH presentation and similar amplitudes during RH presentation, but both of these effects were the greater the more abstract the metaphors were. It is the first time such an electrophysiological abstractness effect is reported, just the opposite of a concreteness effect. It is particularly noteworthy that ERPs evoked by metaphors were not contingent on figurativeness, novelty, meaningfulness, imageability, emotional valence, or arousal, only on abstractness. When compared with similarly novel literal expressions, metaphors did not evoke a typical N400 and did not activate the RH either. The findings shed new light on the neurocognitive machinery of figurative meaning construction, pervasive in everyday communication. Contrary to embodied cognition, the conceptual system might be organized around abstract representations and not sensorimotor information, even for lush, metaphorical language.

Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals.

The comprehension of metaphors involves the ability to activate a broader, more flexible set of semantic associations in order to integrate the meanings of the weakly related parts of the metaphor into a meaningful linguistic expression. Previous findings point to a relation between levels of creativity and efficiency in processing metaphoric expressions, as measured by reaction times (RTs) and error rates. Furthermore, recent studies have found that more creative individuals exhibit a relatively more flexible semantic memory structure compared to less creative individuals, which may facilitate their comprehension of novel metaphors. In the present study, lower and higher creative individuals performed a semantic relatedness judgment task on word pairs. These word pairs comprised four types of semantic relations: novel metaphors, conventional metaphors, literal word pairs, and meaningless word pairs. We hypothesized that the two groups will perform similarly in comprehending the literal, unrelated, and the conventional metaphoric word pairs. However, with respect to novel metaphors, we predicted that higher creative individuals will demonstrate better performance compared to lower creative individuals, as indicated by smaller RTs and more accurate responses. Our main finding shows that higher creative individuals were faster in comprehending both types of metaphors, conventional and novel, compared to lower creative individuals. Furthermore, higher creative individuals were significantly more accurate than lower creative individual only in comprehending novel metaphors. The findings are discussed in light of previous findings regarding the relation between metaphor comprehension, semantic memory, and creativity.

Finding features, figuratively

Object concepts refer to unique clusters of properties that can be selectively activated or inhibited depending on what information is currently relevant. This conceptual “stretching” enables limitless new meanings to be generated, and figurative language provides a useful framework in which to study this conceptual flexibility. Here we probe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension of novel metaphors as a means of understanding the conceptual flexibility inherent to language processing more generally. We show that novel metaphor comprehension involves the activation or inhibition of conceptual properties that are either relevant or irrelevant to the metaphor, and that left inferior frontal gyrus is recruited in this process, supporting a role for this region in the fine-tuning of conceptual meaning. Our results are consistent with a flexible, compositional account of conceptual structure in which semantic control mechanisms operate over conceptual properties during figurative language comprehension in order to create context-dependent meaning.

Enhanced creative thinking under dopaminergic therapy in Parkinson disease.

Creative thinking requires a combination of originality, flexibility, and usefulness. Several reports described enhanced artistic creativity in Parkinson disease (PD) patients treated with dopaminergic agents. We aimed to examine PD patients' ability to perform creativity tasks compared to healthy controls and to verify whether creativity is related to an impulse control disorder (ICD) as a complication of dopaminergic therapy. Right-handed PD patients treated with dopamine agonists and/or levodopa, and age- and education- matched neurologically healthy controls were assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, semantic verbal fluency, Beck Depression Inventory, and Questionnaire for Impulsive-Compulsive Disorders in Parkinson Disease Rating Scale (QUIP-RS). Creativity assessment included Comprehension of Novel Metaphors (CNM), Remote Association Test, and Tel Aviv Creativity Test (TACT). Groups were compared using analyses of variance, t tests, and correlation analyses. Twenty-seven PD patients (age, mean ± standard deviation = 62 ± 7 years; education = 16 ± 3 years; disease duration = 5.8 ± 3.9 years) and 27 controls (age = 59 ± 9 years; education 17 ± 3 years) participated. PD patients performed significantly better than controls in divergent thinking tasks; specifically, the TACT-Visual for both fluency (33.48 ± 11.83 vs 25.59 ± 10.27, p = 0.034) and quality (15.78 ± 7.6 vs 11.19 ± 6.22, p = 0.025). Comprehension of Novel Metaphors was better in PD patients vs controls (0.71 ± 0.23 vs 0.55 ± 0.29, p = 0.04). QUIP-RS scores did not correlate with creativity measures. PD patients treated with dopaminergic drugs demonstrated enhanced verbal and visual creativity as compared to neurologically healthy controls. This feature was unrelated to ICD. Dopaminergic agents might act through the reduction of latent inhibition, resulting in widening of the associative network and enriched divergent thinking.

Beyond the N400: Complementary access to early neural correlates of novel metaphor comprehension using combined electrophysiological and haemodynamic measurements

The simultaneous application of different neuroimaging methods combining high temporal and spatial resolution can uniquely contribute to current issues and open questions in the field of pragmatic language perception. In the present study, comprehension of novel metaphors was investigated using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) combined with the simultaneous acquisition of electroencephalography (EEG)/event-related potentials (ERPs). For the first time, we investigated the effects of figurative language on early electrophysiological markers (P200, N400) and their functional relationship to cortical haemodynamic responses within the language network (Broca's area, Wernicke's area). To this end, 20 healthy subjects judged 120 sentences with respect to their meaningfulness, whereby phrases were either literal, metaphoric, or meaningless. Our results indicated a metaphor-specific P200 reduction and a linear increase of N400 amplitudes from literal over metaphoric to meaningless sentences. Moreover, there were metaphor related effects on haemodynamic responses accessed with NIRS, especially within the left lateral frontal cortex (Broca's area). Significant correlations between electrophysiological and haemodynamic responses indicated that P200 reductions during metaphor comprehension were associated with an increased recruitment of neural activity within left Wernicke's area, indicating a link between variations in neural activity and haemodynamic changes within Wernicke's area. This link may reflect processes related to interindividual differences regarding the ability to classify novel metaphors. The present study underlines the usefulness of simultaneous NIRS measurements in language paradigms – especially for investigating the functional significance of neurophysiological markers that have so far been rarely examined – as these measurements are easily and efficiently realizable and allow for a complementary examination of neural activity and associated metabolic changes in cortical areas.

Productive figurative communication: Conventional metaphors facilitate the comprehension of related novel metaphors

Three experiments explored whether conceptual mappings in conventional metaphors are productive, by testing whether the comprehension of novel metaphors was facilitated by first reading conceptually related conventional metaphors. The first experiment, a replication and extension of Keysar et al. [Keysar, B., Shen, Y., Glucksberg, S., Horton, W. (2000). Conventional language: How metaphorical is it? Journal of Memory and Language 43, 576–593] (Experiment 2), found no such facilitation; however, in the second experiment, upon re-designing and improving the stimulus materials, facilitation was demonstrated. In a final experiment, this facilitation was shown to be specific to the conceptual mappings involved. The authors argue that metaphor productivity provides a communicative advantage and that this may be sufficient to explain the clustering of metaphors into families noted by Lakoff and Johnson [Lakoff & Johnson, M. (1980a). The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4, 195–208].

Dynamics of hemispheric activity during metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological measures

Brain imaging studies have lead to conflicting findings regarding the involvement of the right hemisphere (RH) in metaphor comprehension. Some report more relative RH activation when processing figurative expressions but others have shown just the opposite. The inconsistencies might be a result of the low temporal resolution related to current brain imaging techniques which is insufficient to uncover patterns of hemispheric interaction that change over time. Event-related potentials and a source estimation technique (LORETA) were used to investigate such temporal interactions when processing two-word expressions denoting literal, conventional metaphoric, and novel metaphoric meaning, as well as unrelated word pairs. Participants performed a semantic judgment task in which they decided whether each word pair conveyed a meaningful expression. Our findings indicate that during comprehension of novel metaphors there are some stages of considerable RH involvement, mainly of the temporal and superior frontal areas. Although the processing mechanisms used for all types of expressions were similar and require both hemispheres, the relative contribution of each hemisphere at specific processing stages depended on stimulus type. Those stages correspond roughly to the N400 and LPC components which reflect semantic and contextual integration, respectively. The present study demonstrates that RH mechanisms are necessary, but not sufficient, for understanding metaphoric expressions. Both hemispheres work in concert in a complex dynamical pattern during literal and figurative language comprehension. Electrophysiological recordings together with source localization algorithms such as LORETA are a viable tool for measuring this type of activity patterns.