Does simile comprehension differ from metaphor comprehension? A functional MRI study

• Shibata, Midori

• Toyomura, Akira

• Motoyama, Hiroki

• Itoh, Hiroaki

• Kawabata, Yasuhiro

• Abe, Jun-ichi

抄録

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 comprehension of metaphor and simile using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate whether simile comprehension differs from metaphor comprehension or not. In the metaphor and simile sentence conditions, higher activation was seen in the left inferior frontal gyrus. This result suggests that the activation in both metaphor and simile conditions indicates similar patterns in the left frontal region. The results also suggest that similes elicit higher levels of activation in the medial frontal region which might be related to inference processes, whereas metaphors elicit more right-sided prefrontal activation which might be related to figurative language comprehension.

収録刊行物

• Brain and Language

  Brain and Language 121 (3), 254-260, 2012-06

  Elsevier

キーワード

• Metaphor
• Simile
• Literal sentence
• fMRI
• Inferior frontal gyrus

詳細情報

• CRID: 1050282813987505024
• NII論文ID: 120005228072
• HANDLE: 2115/49416
• ISSN: 0093934X
• 本文言語コード: en
• 資料種別: journal article
• データソース種別:
  • IRDB
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN