{"pk":30113,"title":"Modelling brain activity associated with metaphor processing with distributionalsemantic models","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this study we investigate how lexical-semantic relations as-sociated with the literal meaning (and abstract meaning) arebeing accessed across the brain during familiar metaphor com-prehension. We utilize a data-driven whole-brain searchlightsimilarity-decoding analysis. We contrast decoding metaphoricphrases (”she’s grasping the idea”) using distributional seman-tic models of the verb in the phrase (VERB model) versus thatof the more abstract verb-sense (PARAPHRASE VERB model)obtained from literal paraphrases of the metaphoric phrases(”she’s understanding the idea”). We showed successful decod-ing with the VERB model across frontal, temporal and parietallobes mainly within areas of the language and default-modenetworks. In contrast, decoding with the PARAPHRASE VERBmodel was restricted to frontal-temporal lobes within areas ofthe language-network which overlapped to some extent withsignificant decoding with the VERB model. Overall, the re-sults suggest that lexical-semantic relations closely associatedwith the abstract meaning in metaphor processing are largelylocalized to language and amodal (multimodal) semantic mem-ory systems of the brain, while those more associated withthe literal meaning are processed across a distributed seman-tic network including areas implicated in mental imagery andsocial-cognition.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"metaphor; abstraction; distributional semantics"}],"section":"Poster Session 3","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r35m0kf","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vesna","middle_name":"G.","last_name":"Djokic","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Amsterdam","department":""},{"first_name":"Ekaterina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shutova","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Amsterdam","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30113/galley/19967/download/"}]}