Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to the comparison view, preexisting similarities between the constituent terms of a metaphorical sentence are an important source of information for generating a figurative meaning. The interaction approach, by contrast, claims that similarity is not an antecedent but a product of comprehension. We shall argue, however, that each of these approaches is too narrow to provide a complete and exhaustive account of metaphor comprehension. Instead, both theories point out to two different but complementary cognitive processes. We present three experiments that support the theoretical distinction between analysis-based vs. synthesis-based processes in the comprehension of metaphor.