THE TIME-COURSE OF METAPHOR COMPREHENSION - AN EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL STUDY

ERPs were recorded while subjects were reading short familiar metaphor s (e.g., Those fighters are lions), unfamiliar metaphors (Those appren tices are lions), or literal control sentences (Those animals are lion s) presented in isolation or preceded by either an irrelevant or relev ant context (e.g., They are not idiotic:....'' vs. ''They are not cowa rdly: Those fighters are lions''). The terminal word of metaphors elic ited larger N400 components than did the terminal word of literal sent ences (Experiment 1) suggesting that the (incongruous) literal meaning of metaphors was indeed accessed at some point during comprehension. The analysis of the 600-1000 and 1000-1400 latency bands (Late Positiv e Components) revealed no significant difference between metaphors and literal sentences. The manipulation of metaphor difficulty (Experimen ts 2 and 3) also failed to reveal any late effect specifically linked to metaphorical processing. Finally, an effect of the preceding senten ce context was found in Experiments 3 and 4, as early as 300 ms follow ing the terminal word onset. Overall, these results support a context- dependent account of metaphor comprehension stating that when contextu ally relevant, the metaphorical meaning is the only one accessed. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.