Dynamics of hemispheric activity during metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological measures
Section snippets
Electrophysiological measures of lateralized processing of metaphors
People encounter and use metaphoric expressions regularly in their daily lives. Expressions such as “my lawyer is a shark” are not meant to be taken literally and entail an alternative meaning. One of the most interesting issues in language comprehension is whether metaphorical expressions are processed using the same mechanisms that are used for understanding literal meanings. In particular, the involvement of the right hemisphere (RH) in understanding figurative meanings has attracted
Participants
Twenty-nine right-handed native Hebrew speakers participated in the experiment for monetary compensation. Each subject provided written informed consent before participating.
Stimuli
A list of 96 Hebrew two-word expressions (24 per condition) was formed using conventional metaphoric (CM) expressions (e.g., lucid mind, transparent intention), novel metaphors (NM) drawn from poetry texts (e.g., ripe dream, conscience storm), semantically related (LT) words (e.g., burning fire, problem resolution), and
Results
On average participants classified correctly 92.8% (S.D. = 9.8%) of the UR pairs as not meaningful. Expressions were rated as meaningful on average 95.3% (S.D. = 4.6%) for the LT pairs and 95.1% (S.D. = 6.4%) for the CM pairs, and 57.2% (S.D. = 17.8%) of the NM expressions. Reaction times for correctly classified stimuli to LT and CM pairs (M = 873 ms, S.D. = 127, and M = 880 ms, S.D. = 141, respectively) were shorter than to UR pairs (M = 1015 ms, S.D. = 194) which were in turn shorter than to NM pairs (M =
Discussion
Consistent with our hypothesis, our findings indicate that during comprehension there are some stages of considerable RH involvement in the processing of novel metaphors. Although the processing mechanisms used for all types of expressions were similar, as indicated by similar elicited components and parallel fluctuations in brain volume activation, the relative contribution of each hemisphere at specific processing stages depended on stimulus type. Those stages correspond roughly to the N400
Acknowledgments
The study was performed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the first author's doctoral dissertation at Bar-Ilan University. The experiments were carried out at the Alter Family Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory, Bar-Ilan University.
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