Poster E28, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
How are metonymy and metaphor different: neural processes and contextual effects
Fan Pei Yang1, Maria Pinango2, Andy Zhang2, Yi-hsuan Chen1;1Center for Cognition and Mind Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, 2Department of Linguistics and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University
Metonymy is the use to refer to a term with a word that describes one of the features or qualities of the term. A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to a term by means of verbal analogy with another word. Although the linguistic comparisons involved in creating metonymy and metaphors are different, there is a lack of consistent findings in neural processing difference of these two types of figurative speech. Previous research has reported that metonymy comprehension involved BA 8, 10 and 47, while metaphors activated more extensive regions in the bilateral frontal and temporal gyri in addition to the aforementioned areas . Besides, metonymy, depending on how it is used due to circumstantial need or systematic(conventional) usage, might elicit variations of regional involvement of language processing areas. The present study used event-related fMRI to investigate the difference in processing of circumstantial and systematic Chinese metonymy and metaphors as well as the connectivity analysis with the CONN toolbox (https://web.conn-toolbox.org). Fifteen participants (8 males, 7 females, mean age=22.37, SD=1.31) read pairs of sentences, with the first of each pair being a contextual prime and the second being either a circumstantial metnoymy, systematic metonymy, metaphor or a literal sentence. The main effect of circumstantial usage was shown in the left frontal gyri opercularis and triangularis and middle and inferior temporal gyri. The main effect of figurative speech was found in the bilateral inferior gyri and medial frontal gyrus. The main effect of metaphor was represented in the left middle and inferior gyri. The interactions of circumstantial usage and figurative speech was found in the left frontal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus. The connectivity analysis revealed significant connectivity between the medial and inferior frontal gyri in both hemispheres in the metonymy conditions. The metaphor condition showed significant connectivity of regions in the typical language network, including the left inferior frontal, left superior, middle, inferior temporal gyri. The results supported that figurative speech, depending on the contextual usage, may involve distinctive regions for comprehension. The connectivity analysis results suggest that metaphors might recruit more interactions between subregions in the language network for analogy formation, whereas metonymy might require contextual or systematic inference. This research not only provided more refined analysis of metonymy and metaphor but also revealed the influence of context on figurative speech processing
Themes: Meaning: Combinatorial Semantics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Functional Imaging