Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2016, Pages 1080-1089

  Jamrozik, Anja ^a   McQuire, Marguerite ^a   Cardillo, Eileen R ^a   Chatterjee, Anjan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Abstract concepts; Abstraction; Embodiment; Grounded cognition; Metaphor

Indexed keywords

COGNITION; COMPREHENSION; CONCEPT FORMATION; HUMAN; LITERATURE;

COGNITION; COMPREHENSION; CONCEPT FORMATION; HUMANS; METAPHOR;

EID: 84974806573     PISSN: 10699384     EISSN: 15315320     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-015-0861-0     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. Ackerman, J. M., Nocera, C. C., & Bargh, J. A. (2010). Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decisions. Science, 328, 1712–1715. doi:10.1126/science.1189993
2. Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Damasio, A. (2008). Embodied semantics for actions: Findings from functional brain imaging. Journal of Physiology, 102, 35–39.
3. Aziz-Zadeh, L., Wilson, S. M., Rizzolatti, G., & Iacoboni, M. (2006). Congruent embodied representations for visually presented actions and linguistic phrases describing actions. Current Biology, 16, 1818–1823. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.07.060
4. Barr, R. A., & Caplan, L. J. (1987). Category representations and their implications for category structure. Memory & Cognition, 15, 397–418.
5. Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–609. doi:10.1017/S0140525X99002149. disc. 609–660.
6. Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
7. Blank, G. D. (1988). Metaphors in the lexicon. Metaphor and Symbol, 3, 21–36.
8. Blasko, D. G., & Connine, C. M. (1993). Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, memory, and cognition, 19, 295.
9. Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75, 1–27.
10. Boroditsky, L., & Ramscar, M. (2002). The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science, 13, 185–189. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00434
11. Boulenger, V., Hauk, O., & Pulvermüller, F. (2009). Grasping ideas with the motor system: Semantic somatotopy in idiom comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 1905–1914.
12. Boulenger, V., Shtyrov, Y., & Pulvermüller, F. (2012). When do you grasp the idea? MEG evidence for instantaneous idiom understanding. NeuroImage, 59, 3502–3513.
13. Bowdle, B., & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112, 193–216.
14. Cacciari, C., Bolognini, N., Senna, I., Pellicciari, M. C., Miniussi, C., & Papagno, C. (2011). Literal, fictive and metaphorical motion sentences preserve the motion component of the verb: A TMS study. Brain and Language, 119, 149–157.
15. Cameron, L. (2003). Metaphor in educational discourse. New York: Continuum.
16. Cardillo, E. R., Schmidt, G. L., Kranjec, A., & Chatterjee, A. (2010). Stimulus design is an obstacle course: 560 matched literal and metaphorical sentences for testing neural hypotheses about metaphor. Behavior Research Methods, 42, 651–664. doi:10.3758/BRM.42.3.651
17. Cardillo, E. R., Watson, C. E., Schmidt, G. L., Kranjec, A., & Chatterjee, A. (2013). From novel to familiar: Tuning the brain for metaphors. NeuroImage, 59, 3212–3221.
18. Casasanto, D., & Dijkstra, K. (2010). Motor action and emotional memory. Cognition, 115, 179–185. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.11.002
19. Chatterjee, A. (2008). The neural organization of spatial thought and language. Seminars in Speech and Language, 29, 226–238.
20. Chatterjee, A. (2010). Disembodying cognition. Language and Cognition, 2, 79–116. doi:10.1515/LANGCOG.2010.004
21. Chen, E., Widick, P., & Chatterjee, A. (2008). Functional–anatomical organization of predicate metaphor processing. Brain and Language, 107, 194–202.
22. Chiao, J. Y., Harada, T., Oby, E. R., Li, Z., Parrish, T., & Bridge, D. J. (2009). Neural representations of social status hierarchy in human inferior parietal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 47, 354–363.
23. Citron, F. M. M., & Goldberg, A. E. (2014). Metaphorical sentences are more emotionally engaging than their literal counterparts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26, 2585–2595.
24. Clement, C. A., & Gentner, D. (1991). Systematicity as a selection constraint in analogical mapping. Cognitive Science, 15, 89–132.
25. Desai, R., Binder, J., & Conant, L. (2011). The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 2376–2386.
26. Desai, R. H., Conant, L. L., Binder, J. R., Park, H., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2013). A piece of the action: modulation of sensory-motor regions by action idioms and metaphors. NeuroImage, 83, 862–869.
27. Dove, G. O. (2009). Beyond perceptual symbols: A call for representational pluralism. Cognition, 110, 412–431.
28. Falkenhainer, B., Forbus, K. D., & Gentner, D. (1989). The structure-mapping engine: Algorithm and examples. Artificial Intelligence, 41, 1–63.
29. Fernardino, L., Contant, L. L., Binder, J. R., Blindauer, K., Hiner, B., Spangler, K., & Desai, R. H. (2013). Where is the action? Action sentence processing in Parkinson’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 51, 1510–1517.
30. Fischer, M. H., & Zwaan, R. A. (2008). Embodied language: A review of the role of the motor system in language comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 825–850. doi:10.1080/17470210701623605
31. Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2001). Figurative language processing in the Underspecification Model. Metaphor and Symbol, 16, 149–171.
32. Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory–motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 455–479. doi:10.1080/02643290442000310
33. Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155–170. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3
34. Gentner, D. (1989). The mechanisms of analogical learning. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 199–241). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35. Gentner, D., & Bowdle, B. F. (2001). Convention, form, and figurative language processing. Metaphor and Symbol, 16, 223–247.
36. Gentner, D., & Clement, C. (1988). Evidence for relational selectivity in the interpretation of analogy and metaphor. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 22, pp. 307–358). New York: Academic Press.
37. Gentner, D., & France, I. M. (1988). The verb mutability effect: Studies of the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs. In S. L. Small, G. W. Cottrell, & M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Lexical ambiguity resolution: Perspectives from psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence (pp. 343–382). San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.
38. Gentner, D., & Kurtz, K. J. (2005). Learning and using relational categories. In W. K. Ahn, R. L. Goldstone, B. C. Love, A. B. Markman, & P. W. Wolff (Eds.), Categorization inside and outside the laboratory: Essays in honor of Douglas L. Medin (pp. 151–175). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
39. Gentner, D., & Markman, A. B. (1997). Structure mapping in analogy and similarity. American Psychologist, 52, 45–56.
40. Gentner, D., & Wolff, P. (1997). Alignment in the processing of metaphor. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 331–355.
41. Gentner, D., & Wolff, P. (2000). Metaphor and knowledge change. In E. Dietrich & A. Markman (Eds.), Cognitive dynamics: Conceptual change in humans and machines (pp. 295–342). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
42. Gentner, D., Bowdle, B., Wolff, P., & Boronat, C. (2001). Metaphor is like analogy. In D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, & B. N. Kokinov (Eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science (pp. 199–253). Cambridge: MIT Press.
43. Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
44. Gibbs, R. W. (2006a). Embodiment and cognitive science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
45. Gibbs, R. W. (2006b). Metaphor interpretation as embodied simulation. Mind and Language, 21, 434–458.
46. Gibbs, R. W., Costa Lima, P. L., & Francozo, E. (2004). Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1189–1210.
47. Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 8, 183–206.
48. Giora, R. (1999). On the priority of salient meanings: Studies of literal and figurative language. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 919–929.
49. Giora, R. (2003). On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. New York: Oxford University Press.
50. Glenberg, A. M. (2010). Embodiment as a unifying perspective for psychology. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1, 586–596. doi:10.1002/wcs.55
51. Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 558–565. doi:10.3758/BF03196313
52. Glucksberg, S. (2001). Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
53. Glucksberg, S., & Keysar, B. (1990). Understanding metaphoric comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review, 97, 3–18. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.97.1.3
54. Glucksberg, S., & McGlone, M. S. (2001). Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
55. Glucksberg, S., McGlone, M. S., & Manfredi, D. (1997). Property attribution in metaphor comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 50–67.
56. Glucksberg, S., Newsome, M. R., & Goldvarg, Y. (2001). Inhibition of the literal: Filtering metaphor-irrelevant information during metaphor comprehension. Metaphor and Symbol, 16, 277–298.
57. Hauk, O., Johnsrude, I., & Pulvermüller, F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron, 41, 301–307. doi:10.1016/S0896-6273(03)00838-9
58. Heine, B. (1997). Cognitive foundations of grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
59. Honeck, R. P., Kibler, C. T., & Firment, M. J. (1987). Figurative language and psychological views of categorization: Two ships in the night? In R. E. Haskell (Ed.), Cognition and symbolic structures: The psychology of metaphoric transformation (pp. 103–120). Norwood: Ablex.
60. Humphreys, G. F., Newling, K., Jennings, C., & Gennari, S. P. (2013). Motion and actions in language: Semantic representations in occipito-temporal cortex. Brain and Language, 125, 94–105.
61. Johnson, A. T. (1996). Comprehension of metaphors and similes: A reaction time study. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 11, 145–159.
62. Johnson, M. G., & Malgady, R. G. (1979). Some cognitive aspects of figurative language: Association and metaphor. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8, 249–265.
63. Kable, J. W., Lease-Spellmeyer, J., & Chatterjee, A. (2002). Neural substrates of action event knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 795–805.
64. Kable, J. W., Kan, I. P., Wilson, A., Thompson-Schill, S. L., & Chatterjee, A. (2005). Conceptual representations of action in the lateral temporal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1855–1870. doi:10.1162/089892905775008625
65. Kemmerer, D., Castillo, J. G., Talavage, T., Patterson, S., & Wiley, C. (2008). Neuroanatomical distribution of five semantic components of verbs: Evidence from fMRI. Brain and Language, 107, 16–43. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2007.09.003
66. Kövecses, Z. (1986). Metaphors of anger, pride, and love. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
67. Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
68. Lacey, S., Stilla, R., & Sathian, K. (2012). Metaphorically feeling: comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex. Brain and Language, 120, 416–421.
69. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
70. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
71. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
72. Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
73. Lebois, L. A. M., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., & Barsalou, L. W. (2014). Are automatic conceptual cores the gold standard of semantic processing? The context-dependence of spatial meaning in grounded congruency effects. Cognitive Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/cogs.12174
74. Lehrer, A. (1990). Polysemy, conventionality, and the structure of the lexicon. Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 207–246.
75. Mahon, B. Z., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology, 102, 59–70. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004
76. Markman, A. B., & Gentner, D. (1993). Structural alignment during similarity comparisons. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 431–467.
77. Markman, A. B., & Stilwell, C. H. (2001). Role-governed categories. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Intelligence, 13, 329–358.
78. Mashal, N., Faust, M., Hendler, T., & Jung-Beeman, M. (2007). An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Brain and Language, 100, 115–126. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2005.10.005
79. Meier, B. P., & Robinson, M. D. (2004). Why the sunny side is up: Associations between affect and vertical position. Psychological Science, 15, 243–247.
80. Miller, G. A. (1979). Images and models, similes and metaphors. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 202–253). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139173865.019
81. Murphy, G. L. (1996). On metaphoric representation. Cognition, 60, 173–204. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(96)00711-1
82. Murphy, G. L. (1997). Reasons to doubt the present evidence for metaphoric representation. Cognition, 62, 99–108. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00725-1
83. Obert, A., Gierski, F., Calmus, A., Portefaix, C., Declercq, C., Pierot, L., & Caillies, S. (2014). Differential bilateral involvement of the parietal gyrus during predicative metaphor processing: An auditory fMRI study. Brain and Language, 137, 112–119.
84. Ortony, A. (1979). Beyond literal similarity. Psychological Review, 86, 161–180. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.86.3.161
85. Ortony, A. (1993). Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
86. Pecher, D., & Zwaan, R. A. (Eds.). (2005). Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
87. Raposo, A., Moss, H. E., Stamatakis, E. A., & Tyler, L. K. (2009). Modulation of motor and premotor cortices by actions, action words and action sentences. Neuropsychologia, 47, 388–396. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.09.017
88. Reilly, J., Westbury, C., Kean, J., & Peelle, J. E. (2012). Arbitrary symbolism in natural language revisited: When word forms carry meaning. PLoS ONE, 7, e42286. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042286
89. Richardson, D. C., Spivey, M. J., Barsalou, L. W., & McRae, K. (2003). Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science, 27, 767–780.
90. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230
91. Romero Lauro, L. J., Mattavelli, G., Papagno, C., & Tettamanti, M. (2013). She runs, the road runs, my mind runs, bad blood runs between us: literal and figurative motion verbs: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 83, 361–371.
92. Saygin, A., McCullough, S., Alac, M., & Emmorey, K. (2010). Modulation of BOLD response in motion-sensitive lateral temporal cortex by real and fictive motion sentences. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 2480–2890.
93. Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
94. Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
95. Tettamanti, M., Buccino, G., Saccuman, M. C., Gallese, V., Danna, M., Scifo, P., … Perani, D. (2005). Listening to action-related sentences activates fronto-parietal motor circuits. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 273–281. doi:10.1162/0898929053124965
96. Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE, 6, e16782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016782
97. Tootell, R. B. H., Reppas, J. B., Kwong, K. K., Malach, R., Born, R. T., Brady, T. J., … Belliveau, J. W. (1995). Functional analysis of human MT and related visual cortical areas using magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 3215–3230.
98. Torreano, L. A., Cacciari, C., & Glucksberg, S. (2005). When dogs can fly: Level of abstraction as a cue to metaphorical use of verbs. Metaphor and Symbol, 20, 259–274.
99. Traugott, E. C. (1978). On the expression of spatio-temporal relations in language. Universals of Human Language, 3, 369–400.
100. Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327–352. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.84.4.327
101. Wallentin, M., Lund, T., Östergaard, S., Östergaard, L., & Roepstorff, A. (2005a). Motion verb sentences activate left posterior middle temporal cortex despite static context. NeuroReport, 16, 649–652.
102. Wallentin, M., Östergaard, S., Lund, T. E., Östergaard, L., & Roepstorff, A. (2005b). Concrete spatial language: see what I mean? Brain and Language, 92, 221–233.
103. Wallentin, M., Nielsen, A. H., Vuust, P., Dohn, A., Roepstorff, A., & Lund, T. E. (2011). BOLD response to motion verbs in left posterior middle temporal gyrus during story comprehension. Brain and Language, 119, 221–225.
104. Watson, C. E., Cardillo, E. R., Ianni, G. R., & Chatterjee, A. (2013). Action concepts in the brain: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25, 1191–1205. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00401
105. Wiemer-Hastings, K., & Xu, X. (2005). Content differences for abstract and concrete concepts. Cognitive Science, 29, 719–736.
106. Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 625–636. doi:10.3758/BF03196322
107. Wilson, N. L., & Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (2007). Real and imagined body movement primes metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science, 31, 721–731. doi:10.1080/15326900701399962
108. Wolff, P., & Gentner, D. (2011). Structure-mapping in metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science, 35, 1456–1488.
109. Zharikov, S., & Gentner, D. (2002). Why do metaphors seem deeper than similes? In W. D. Gray & C. Schunn (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 976–981). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
110. Zwaan, R. A., & Taylor, L. J. (2006). Seeing, acting, understanding: Motor resonance in language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 1–11. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.135.1.1