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, electro-physiological methods seem to be more informative. Event-related potential studies re-port 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 un-derstanding of many aspects related to figurative language comprehension.