Topic: metaphor comprehension

Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. To date, the vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun-noun metaphors of the form An X is a Y (e.g., My job is a jail). Yet there is evidence that verb metaphor (e.g., I sailed through my exams) is more common. Despite this, comparatively little work has examined how verb metaphors are processed. In this talk, I will propose a novel account for verb metaphor comprehension: verb metaphors are understood in the same way that analogies are—as comparisons processed via structure-mapping. I will discuss t

What do people do when they comprehend language in discourse? According to many psychologists, they build and maintain cognitive representations of utterances in four complementary mental models for discourse that interact with each other: the surface text, the text base, the situation model, and the context model. When people encounter metaphors in these utterances, they need to incorporate them into each of these mental representations for the discourse. Since influential metaphor theories define metaphor as a form of (figurative) analogy, involving cross-domain mapping of a smaller or great