Understanding of figurative language (on the example of metaphor)

The article is about understanding of figurative language through the example of metaphors. In the first part of the article provides an overview of experimental research of understanding of "literal" and "figurative" meaning. It is shown that "good metaphor" is processed as quickly as text that has a literal meaning. In addition, a person cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of a statement, even if it has a literal meaning, which is ideally suited to the context. The study of brain activity by evoked potentials (ERP) showed that the time of processing of the same word in a metaphorical and nonmetaphorical context did not change. The only difference was in the value of the negative potential of the brain N400, which is fixed, if the word is used in the unexpected context. The more complex the meaning integration of the word is in the current context, the higher the observed amplitude of the potential N400. These data agree with the study of ontogeny of metaphor understanding: children recognize a statement as metaphorical before they are able to understand its meaning. In the second part of the article the example of qualitative research of metaphor understanding is given. The stimuli were the pairs of metaphors with a repeated subsidiary concept ("A is B", "C is B"). Because of such organization of the stimuli, one and the same concept ("B") was used for transferring the different ideas. The study was conducted by the method of "Pictogram". 31 people aged 17 - 26 years (students of the Faculty of St. Petersburg State University of Psychology) took part in the research. The presupposition of the study was that the graphic representation of metaphors meaning provides the reconstruction of the events taking place in the mental space of the subject. The pertaining of concepts of the metaphor to distant domains has become a kind of the semantic marker, which helped to trace how the elements of two different domains are blended. It has been shown that one and the same subsidiary concept changed its current mental representation when entering different semantic contexts. The author concludes that in the present studies of the understanding it is necessary to shift the research focus from the distinction of the literal and figurative meaning to the question of how meaning is constructed in the "actual situation of thinking" (English analogue is "on-line thinking"). The concept of "mental representation" is the theoretical construct that links the "objectively" existing meanings of words with the mental experience of a person and situational context.

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