Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The nature of the mental processes involved in metaphorcomprehension has been the focus of debate. Research related tothis debate has mainly examined the comprehension of simplenominal metaphors. Here we take an individual-differencesapproach to examine the comprehension of slightly morecomplex metaphors, some taken from literary sources, using twotypes of comprehension tests (selecting an overall interpretationor else selecting a completion). In a series of metaphor-comprehension experiments with college students, we measuredboth fluid intelligence (using the non-verbal Raven’s ProgressiveMatrices test) and crystalized verbal intelligence (using a newSemantic Similarities Test). Each measure had a dissociablepredictive relationship to metaphor comprehension, at least forthose of the more complex literary variety. The pattern ofindividual differences suggests that metaphor comprehensionbroadly depends on both crystalized and fluid intelligence, withthe latter less important for relatively simple metaphors.