Metaphor Processing: From Neighborhoods to Neurons - Hamad Al-Azary

Experimental work in cognitive science has repeatedly shown that metaphor is rapidly and automatically processed, shapes thought and perception, and is frequently produced in communication, leading many to view it as being on equal footing with literal language. Surprisingly, by focusing on higher-order cognitive structures (such as cross-domain mappings), this rich body of work has yet to seriously address how the semantic lexicon so readily supports metaphorical meaning virtually anywhere and anytime. The semantic lexicon is our mental storehouse of lexico-semantic representations, organized in network-like structures known as neighborhoods, and is the engine of linguistic meaning. In this talk, I will describe how linguistic and sensorimotor experience builds rich lexico-semantic representations, and how cognitive control processes manipulate such representations to support metaphor processing. In particular, this talk will feature converging evidence, from psycholinguistic experiments, neuropsychological case-studies, computational modelling, EEG, and brain stimulation, in order to demonstrate that lexico-semantic representations and cognitive control processes, which underlie literal language, are also foundational for generating metaphorical meaning in the semantic lexicon.