黑料吃瓜网

Getting meanings with the mind's eye: how electroencephalography can be used to capture mental imagery involvement during metaphor processing

With speaker Dr Federico Frau

You can join this event in person in Room 412, at 52 Pritchatts Road or on . 

Theoretical accounts of metaphor comprehension dispute on whether our ability to understand figurative meaning involves either images or amodal, abstract propositions: on the one hand, some positions argue that metaphor understanding is entirely based on imagery processes generated by metaphoric thinking, with cognitive linguistics theories suggesting that mental images reflect sensory-motor simulations of the body in action; on the other hand, post-Gricean accounts in pragmatics assume that metaphoric meaning is fully propositional and that the linguistic (and conceptual) system supporting pragmatic implicatures is essentially symbolic. Beyond such dichotomy, in-between positions assume that metaphor processing entails two parallel routes, both relevant to grasping metaphoric meaning: a 'linguistic' route (i.e., abstract) and an 'imagistic' one. Psycholinguistic literature includes some pieces of evidence supporting imagery involvement during metaphor comprehension, but this is limited to literal aspects of the metaphorically used words (e.g., we might activate sensory-motor information linked with the action of biting when hearing the metaphor ‘that lawyer is a shark’, suggesting that a mental image of a ‘shark’ is likely to be aroused) and is confined to behavioral data only.

In my talk, I will briefly introduce the theoretical debate concerning the content and nature of metaphorical representations and previous neuro/psycholinguistic experiments related to this topic. Then, I will present an EEG experiment explicitly testing whether we activate mental images during figurative language processing. In describing the experiment paradigm and the main results, I will focus on different methodological choices related to EEG signal analysis, as well as potential challenges linked to the research question.

Bio

Federico Frau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laboratory of Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics (NEP) of the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS, Pavia (Italy). In 2024, he obtained a Ph.D. degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS, defending a thesis on the role of multimodal experience during semantic and pragmatic processing in typical adults, as well as neurological and psychiatric conditions. His main research activities concern the involvement of multimodal semantic dimensions – including sensory-motor and bodily experience, also extending to aspects related to visual and motor imagery – in literal and figurative language processing, investigated via a combination of behavioral and neurophysiological (e.g., EEG recording) techniques in typical and atypical populations.