The study of concepts in psychology has historically had little to say about the possible influence of metaphor on mental representation. This silence is not terribly surprising given the long-standing view that metaphor is an ornamental, even deviant, form of language bearing no relation to how people actually conceptualize of objects, individuals, events, and abstract ideas. But in the last 2...

According to contemporary theories of cognition, the process of metaphorical interpretation is conceived of as a 'mapping' from a source domain to a target domain. The author of this paper believes, in contrast, that this process of mapping does not take place in a vacuum, but rather is influenced by both agentive and contextual factors. By the agentive factors of metaphorical cognition, she re...

Research suggests that gestures influence cognitive processes, but the exact mechanism is not clear. Additionally, it has been shown that when a linguistic task (metaphor explanation) involves the right brain hemisphere, the left hand becomes more gesturally active. We hypothesized that gestures with a particular hand activate cognitive processes in the contralateral hemisphere. We examined whe...

Teasing apart the role of cognitive and linguistic factors in children's metaphorical abilities. ABSTRACT Metaphor plays a unique role in cognitive development by structuring abstract concepts and leading to conceptual change. Existing work suggests early emergence of metaphorical abilities, with five-year-olds understanding and explaining metaphors that involve cross-domain comparisons (e.g., ...

Creativity is difficult to define and a universal definition remains elusive. However, common words associated with creativity affirm that it concerns novelty and originality, hallmarks of many great and enduring texts. Students can also be encouraged to surface original ideas through constructing their own creative texts. This article outlines such a project that focuses on metaphorical writin...

In metaphor research there is usually some notion of transfer of aspects of the source domain to the target domain. More rarely, transfers in the opposite direction are countenanced, affecting one’s perception of source as well as target. This paper argues that, even without this aim, transfers from target to source should happen. One radical claim here is that it is often better to translate i...

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. Using a sensicality judgment ...

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. This paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of 4 alternatives) the sentence they thought best com...

The purpose of this article is to present theoretical and empirical arguments for an analytic distinction between metaphorical discourse and conventional metaphor. Traditionally, in linguistics and anthropology, the formal approach to metaphors is to decompose them into conventional units of meaning, e.g., analytic predications. However, when dealing with everyday discourse, an analyst confront...

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaph...