Can Illness be Bright? Metaphor comprehension depends on linguistic and embodied factors

Conceptual representations in language processing employ both linguistic distributional and embodied information. Here, we aim to demonstrate the roles of these two components in metaphor processing. The linguistic component is captured by linguistic distributional frequency (LDF), that is, how often the constituent words appear together in context. The embodied component, on the other hand, refers to how easy it is to generate an embodied simulation, operationalised by a previous norming study. In the current study, we looked at the interplay of these components in metaphor processing, and investigated their roles at different depths of processing in two experiments. Thus, we required participants to engage in shallow processing (Experiment 1: Sensibility Judgement), or deep processing (Experiment 2: Interpretation Generation). Results showed that the increase of both variables made it more likely to accept a metaphor. However, whereas ease of simulation (EoS) contributed to the speed of processing at both levels of depth, LDF only affected the speed in shallow processing. Specifically, LDF acted as a heuristic, both to speed up responses to accept metaphors as sensible when the frequency is high, and to flag up potentially unsuccessful processing when it is low. Overall, these results support views of language processing that emphasise the importance of both linguistic and embodied components according to task goals.