Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study we investigate how lexical-semantic relations as-sociated with the literal meaning (and abstract meaning) arebeing accessed across the brain during familiar metaphor com-prehension. We utilize a data-driven whole-brain searchlightsimilarity-decoding analysis. We contrast decoding metaphoricphrases (”she’s grasping the idea”) using distributional seman-tic models of the verb in the phrase (VERB model) versus thatof the more abstract verb-sense (PARAPHRASE VERB model)obtained from literal paraphrases of the metaphoric phrases(”she’s understanding the idea”). We showed successful decod-ing with the VERB model across frontal, temporal and parietallobes mainly within areas of the language and default-modenetworks. In contrast, decoding with the PARAPHRASE VERBmodel was restricted to frontal-temporal lobes within areas ofthe language-network which overlapped to some extent withsignificant decoding with the VERB model. Overall, the re-sults suggest that lexical-semantic relations closely associatedwith the abstract meaning in metaphor processing are largelylocalized to language and amodal (multimodal) semantic mem-ory systems of the brain, while those more associated withthe literal meaning are processed across a distributed seman-tic network including areas implicated in mental imagery andsocial-cognition.