Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent emphases on differences between metaphors andsimiles pose a quandary. The two forms clearly differ instrength, but often seem to require similar interpretations. InExperiment 1 we show that ratings of comprehensibility arehighly correlated across simile and metaphor sentencesdiffering only in the presence or absence of “like”. InExperiment 2 we show that comprehensibility ratings forfigurative forms predict both early (first pass) and late(second pass) fixation durations for metaphor vehicle, butonly late fixation durations for vehicles in similes. Similevehicles appear to initially be processed similarly to literalcomparisons, with figurative interpretation occurring later.These observations are consistent with the different pragmaticstrengths, and similar interpretations of the two forms.