Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we present a simple process model (based on connectionist pattern completion) of A is B metaphor comprehension. The Metaphor by Pattern Completion (MPC) model capitalizes on an existing semantic memory mechanism. Metaphorical enhancement is produced by presenting a semantic vector representation of the target word (A) to a connectionist network storing the knowledge base (B). Effects found in human data such as meaning enhancement, asymmetric processing, context sensitivity and compound indexing all fall naturally out of the pattern completion mechanism. The MPC model suggests a simple way of separating literal from metaphorical statements. It provides a means of predicting when a metaphor will appear to fail. Moreover, we suggest that the mechanism can form the basis of a comparison procedure that supports analogy. The MPC mechanism avoids the problem of identifying which features of a concept are relevant for similarity matching in analogies, because the prior metaphor stage naturally enhances relevant features and suppresses the irrelevant features. The M P C model is both domain general (in that it does not depend on the structure of the metaphor domain) and parsimonious (in that it does not posit metaphor-specific mechanisms).