#3648. Conventional metaphors elicit greater real-time engagement than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences

October 2026publication date
Proposal available till 02-06-2025
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Journal’s subject area:
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology;
Artificial Intelligence;
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Abstract:
Conventional metaphors are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases. Extensive norming matched differences across sentence types in complexity, plausibility, emotional valence, intensity, and familiarity of the key phrases. Then, using pupillometry to study the time course of metaphor processing, we predicted that metaphors would elicit greater event-evoked pupil dilation compared to other sentence types. Results confirmed the predicted increase beginning at the onset of the key phrase and lasting seconds beyond the end of the sentence. Conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences in a way that is irreducible to difficulty or ease, amount of information, short-term lexical access, or downstream inferences.
Keywords:
Comprehension; Focused attention; Meaning; Metaphor; Pupil dilation; Sentence processing

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