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  • Title: How metaphors influence semantic relatedness judgments: the role of the right frontal cortex.
    Author: Stringaris AK, Medford N, Giora R, Giampietro VC, Brammer MJ, David AS.
    Journal: Neuroimage; 2006 Nov 01; 33(2):784-93. PubMed ID: 16963282.
    Abstract:
    We used event-related fMRI (ER-fMRI) to test the hypothesis that metaphors bias cognitive processing of semantic relatedness towards a search for a wider range of associations. Twelve right-handed male volunteers read a mixture of metaphoric and literal sentences, each sentence being followed by a single word, which could be semantically related or not to the preceding sentence context. We found that judging unrelated words as contextually irrelevant was associated with increased blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in the metaphoric but not in the literal condition. The same region was also activated when subjects endorsed a semantic relation between words and metaphoric sentence primes but not between words and literal sentence primes. We argue that these results are consistent with the notion of semantic open-endedness, whereby figurative statements bias cognitive processing towards a search for a wider range of semantic relationships compared to literal statements, and thus lend further support to the view that coarse semantic coding occurs preferentially in the right hemisphere.
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