The Neural Basis of Metaphor Comprehension: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Degeneration

Despite the ubiquity of metaphor in cognition and communication, it is absent from standard clinical assessments of language, and the neural systems that support metaphor processing are debated. Previous research shows that patients with focal brain lesions can display selective impairments in processing metaphor, suggesting that figurative language abilities may be disproportionately vulnerable to brain injury. We hypothesized that metaphor processing is especially vulnerable to neurodegenerative disease, and that the left hemisphere is critical for normal metaphor processing. To evaluate these hypotheses, we tested metaphor comprehension in patients with left-hemisphere neurodegeneration, and in demographically matched healthy comparison participants. Stimuli consisted of moderately familiar metaphors and closely matched literal sentences sharing the same source term (e.g., The interview was a painful crawl / The infant’s motion was a crawl). Written sentences were presented, followed by four modifier-noun answer choices (one target and three foils). Healthy controls, though reliably better at literal than metaphor trials, comprehended both sentence conditions well. By contrast, participants with left-hemisphere neurodegeneration performed disproportionately poorly on metaphor comprehension. Anatomical analyses show relationships between metaphor accuracy and patient atrophy in the left middle and superior temporal gyri, and the left inferior frontal gyrus, areas that have been implicated in supporting metaphor comprehension in previous imaging research. The behavioral results also suggest deficits of metaphor comprehension may be a sensitive measure of cognitive dysfunction in some forms of neurodegenerative disease.