Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the advantages of using metaphorical expressions over literal ones might be that speakers can convey not only the intended property, but also its degree. For example, when hearing “John is a shark”, the listener might infer that the speaker aims to communicate that John is as mean as a typical shark. We present experimental findings supporting this hypothesis, along with a novel metaphor interpretation model, which is implemented within the Rational Speech Act framework. We compare our model's predictions to those of an existing RSA model of metaphor understanding, within which the listener infers just the presence or absence of a feature as opposed to its degree, and find that our model produces a significantly better fit.