Motor activation in literal and non-literal sentences: does time matter?

Despite the impressive amount of evidence showing involvement of the sensorimotor systems in language processing, important questions remain unsolved among which the relationship between non-literal uses of language and sensorimotor activation. The literature did not yet provide a univocal answer on whether the comprehension of non-literal, abstract motion sentences engages the same neural networks recruited for literal sentences. A previous TMS study using the same experimental materials of the present study showed activation for literal, fictive and metaphoric motion sentences but not for idiomatic ones. To evaluate whether this may depend on insufficient time for elaborating the idiomatic meaning, we conducted a behavioral experiment that used a sensibility judgment task performed by pressing a button either with a hand finger or with a foot. Motor activation is known to be sensitive to the action-congruency of the effector used for responding. Therefore, all other things being equal, significant differences between response emitted with an action-congruent or incongruent effector (foot vs. hand) may be attributed to motor activation. Foot-related action verbs were embedded in sentences conveying literal motion, fictive motion, metaphoric motion or idiomatic motion. Mental sentences were employed as a control condition. foot responses were significantly faster than finger responses but only in literal motion sentences. We hypothesize that motor activation may arise in early phases of comprehension processes (i.e., upon reading the verb) for then decaying as a function of the strength of the semantic motion component of the verb

The Comprehension of Metaphorical Descriptions Conveying Gender Stereotypes. An Exploratory Study.

In this adjective elicitation study, we investigated the comprehension of Italian sentences where a metaphorically intended noun (e.g., butterfly, nightmare) was used to describe a gender-stereotyped or stereotype-neutral individual (e.g., flute player, engineer, person). Specifically, we explored whether and to what extent meaning availability and the affective valence of these metaphorical descriptions (e.g., This flute player is a butterfly) varied as a function of the stereotypical or stereotype-neutral nature of the sentential subject, the male vs. female direction of the stereotype, and the grammatical gender marked in the subject noun phrase. Our goals were to test whether the meaning of metaphorical descriptions was equally available regardless of the presence and direction of the gender stereotype and of the grammatical gender of the subject, and whether the adjectives expressing the sentential meaning had the same affective valence no matter who was the subject. The results showed that it was easier (i.e., more adjectives came up to mind) to express the sentence meaning when the sentences described male stereotyped individuals than female stereotyped or stereotype-neutral individuals. The adjective valence did not significantly change according to the subject type. Participants produced adjectives with the wrong grammatical gender more often for males in stereotypically female occupations than for females in stereotypically male occupations. These gender errors occurred also when the sentences described females engaged in stereotypically female occupations. Overall, these results extend to metaphorical descriptions previous findings showing that a social group (males) is seen as more normative than another (females), and acts as the unmarked normative group

Is black always the opposite of white? The comprehension of antonyms in schizophrenia and in healthy participants

In this study, we tested the online comprehension of antonyms in 39 Italian patients with paranoid schizophrenia and in an equal number of pairwise-matched healthy controls. Patients were rather accurate in identifying antonyms, but compared to controls, they showed longer response times and higher priming scores, suggesting an exaggerated contextual facilitation. Presumably, this reflects a deficient controlled semantic processing and an overreliance on stored semantic representations

Electrophysiological correlates of idiom comprehension: semantic composition does not follow lexical retrieval

We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally-plausible idioms (e.g., break the ice) are retrieved from memory and semantically composed during sentence comprehension. Idiom strings were embedded in highly predictable, literal and idiomatic contexts. EEG data showed that the integration of the idiom\u2019s conventional meaning occurred at the end of the expression and affected the Post-N400 Positivity. Time-Frequency Representation of the EEG clarified that prior to integrating the idiom\u2019s meaning, an increase in power of higher gamma frequency band was associated only with literal processing. We argue that idioms comprehension proceeds in discrete steps: idiom recognition hampers semantic composition processes so that readers wait until the end of the expression to integrate the idiom meaning with the representation of the sentence

Idiomatic expressions evoke stronger emotional responses in the brain than literal sentences

Recent neuroscientific research shows that metaphors engage readers at the emotional level more strongly than literal expressions. What still remains unclear is what makes metaphors more engaging, and whether this generalises to all figurative expressions, no matter how conventionalised they are. This fMRI study aimed to investigate whether idiomatic expressions - the least creative part of figurative language - indeed trigger a higher affective resonance than literal expressions, and to explore possible interactions between activation in emotion-relevant neural structures and regions associated with figurative language processing. Participants silently read for comprehension a set of emotionally positive, negative and neutral idioms embedded in short sentences, and similarly valenced literal sentences. As in studies on metaphors, we found enhanced activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus and left amygdala in response to idioms, indexing stronger recruitment of executive control functions and enhanced emotional engagement, respectively. This suggests that the comprehension of even highly conventionalised and familiar figurative expressions, namely idioms, recruits regions involved in emotional processing. Furthermore, increased activation of the IFG interacted positively with activation in the amygdala, suggesting that the stronger cognitive engagement driven by idioms may in turn be coupled with stronger involvement at the emotional level

Is the comprehension of idiomatic sentences indeed impaired in paranoid Schizophrenia? A window into semantic processing deficits

Schizophrenia patients have been reported to be more impaired in comprehending non-literal than literal language since early studies on proverbs. Preference for literal rather than figurative interpretations continues to be documented. The main aim of this study was to establish whether patients are indeed able to use combinatorial semantic processing to comprehend literal sentences and both combinatorial analysis, and retrieval of pre-stored meanings to comprehend idiomatic sentences. The study employed a sentence continuation task in which subjects were asked to decide whether a target word was a sensible continuation of a previous sentence fragment to investigate idiomatic and literal sentence comprehension in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Patients and healthy controls were faster in accepting sensible continuations than in rejecting non-sensible ones in both literal and idiomatic sentences. Patients were as accurate as controls in comprehending literal and idiomatic sentences, but they were overall slower than controls in all conditions. Once the contribution of cognitive covariates was partialled out, the response times (RTs) to sensible idiomatic continuations of patients did not significantly differ from those of controls. This suggests that the state of residual schizophrenia did not contribute to slower processing of sensible idioms above and beyond the cognitive deficits that are typically associated with schizophrenia

Is Black Always the Opposite of White? An Investigation on the Comprehension of Antonyms in People with Schizophrenia and in Healthy Participants

The present investigation sought to expand our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of antonyms and to evaluate whether these processes differed in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Antonymy is the most robust of the lexico-semantic relations and is relevant to both the mental organization of the lexicon and the organization of coherent discourse, as attested by the resurgence of interest in antonymy in the linguistic and psychological domains. In contrast, the vast literature on semantic processing in schizophrenia almost ignored antonymy. In this study, we tested the online comprehension of antonyms in 39 Italian patients with paranoid schizophrenia and in an equal number of pairwise-matched healthy controls. Participants read a definitional sentence fragment (e.g., the opposite of black is), followed by the correct antonym (white) or by a semantically unrelated word (nice), and judged whether or not the target word was correct. Patients were rather accurate in identifying antonyms, but compared to controls, they showed longer response times and higher priming scores, suggesting an exaggerated contextual facilitation. Presumably, this reflects a deficient controlled semantic processing and an overreliance on stored semantic representation

When emotions are expressed figuratively:psycholinguistic and affective norms of 619 idioms for German (PANIG)

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been under-investigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom, and rated how confident they were on the attributed meaning. Results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results on single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meaning of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meaning of ambiguous idioms was less correctly defined than that of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterising idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing

Words hurt: common and distinct neural substrates underlying nociceptive and semantic pain

Introduction: Recent studies have shown that processing semantic pain, such as words associated with physical pain, modulates pain perception and enhances activity in regions of the pain matrix. A direct comparison between activations due to noxious stimulation and processing of words conveying physical pain may clarify whether and to what extent the neural substrates of nociceptive pain are shared by semantic pain. Pain is triggered also by experiences of social exclusion, rejection or loss of significant others (the so-called social pain), therefore words expressing social pain may modulate pain perception similarly to what happens with words associated with physical pain. This event-related fMRI study aims to compare the brain activity related to perceiving nociceptive pain and that emerging from processing semantic pain, i.e., words related to either physical or social pain, in order to identify common and distinct neural substrates. Methods: Thirty-four healthy women underwent two fMRI sessions each. In the Semantic session, participants were presented with positive words, negative pain-unrelated words, physical pain-related words, and social pain-related words. In the Nociceptive session, participants received cutaneous mechanical stimulations that could be either painful or not. During both sessions, participants were asked to rate the unpleasantness of each stimulus. Linguistic stimuli were also rated in terms of valence, arousal, pain relatedness, and pain intensity, immediately after the Semantic session. Results: In the Nociceptive session, the 'nociceptive stimuli' vs. 'non-nociceptive stimuli' contrast revealed extensive activations in SI, SII, insula, cingulate cortex, thalamus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In the Semantic session, words associated with social pain, compared to negative pain-unrelated words, showed increased activity in most of the same areas, whereas words associated with physical pain, compared to negative pain-unrelated words, only activated the left supramarginal gyrus and partly the postcentral gyrus. Discussion: Our results confirm that semantic pain partly shares the neural substrates of nociceptive pain. Specifically, social pain-related words activate a wide network of regions, mostly overlapping with those pertaining to the affective-motivational aspects of nociception, whereas physical pain-related words overlap with a small cluster including regions related to the sensory-discriminative aspects of nociception. However, most regions of overlap are differentially activated in different conditions