The following review critically synthesizes the literature on hemispheric differences in idiom and metaphor comprehension. It has long been debated whether figurative language is inherently different from literal language and is processed specifically in the right hemisphere (RH), or rather, whether figurative and literal language form a continuum rather than a dichotomy, and call upon a simila...

This study investigated the cognitive and linguistic factors presumed to be associated with adult comprehension of figurative language, including age, working memory (WM), figurative language type, and reading comprehension (RC). Forty younger (M = 22 years) and 40 older (M = 63 years) healthy African American adults completed WM and reading tasks, and the 60-item forced-choice multiple-categor...

In this paper I review some of the theoretical issues surrounding metaphor, and trace them through the context of the cognitive neuroscience debate. Metaphor, like all figurative language, has been usually explained as a secondary linguistic process which takes place as a function taking place on literal language. However this explanation does not fit well with some of the recent work on right ...

We present an approach to mining online forums for figurative language such as metaphor. We target in particular online discussions within the illness and the political conflict domains, with a view to constructing corpora of Metaphor in Illness Discussion, and Metaphor in Political Conflict Discussion. This paper reports on our ongoing efforts to combine manual and automatic detection strategi...

The Metaphorical Brain Long considered a peripheral topic in linguistics, metaphor is increasingly viewed as a central feature of higher cognition and abstract thought. Investigation of the neural substrate of metaphor has, similarly, become more sophisticated, involving increasingly specific suggestions about the processes involved in its comprehension. This Frontiers Research Topic brings tog...

Figurative language is one of the literary devices used to enrich meaning literature work. The research problem this find figurative and its in novel “It Starts with Us”. This qualitative study. data collection taken from Us” by Collen Roover, published 2022. shows that there were five kinds simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, repetition. Out 86 data; 76 (86%) simile consisted using “...

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 c...

Since Aristotle, people have believed that metaphors and similes express the same type of figurative meaning, despite the fact that they are expressed with different sentence patterns. In contrast, recent psycholinguistic models have suggested that metaphors and similes may promote different comprehension processes. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates involved in the comprehens...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...

Cognitive linguists contend that learners’ awareness of motivations is the key in not only second language acquisition but also figurative language learning. Two cognitive-oriented methods are proposed to raise L2 learners’ awareness on metaphoric/metonymic expressions and to enhance retention: instruction involving conceptual metaphors (CM) and instruction involving metaphoric mappings (MM). T...