Language
Is the right brain hemisphere necessary for understanding metaphors?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Injuries to the left hemisphere, rather than the right hemisphere, cause selective difficulties in understanding metaphorical language.
Key findings
The researchers discovered that only patients with left hemisphere damage exhibited selective impairments in metaphor comprehension, whereas those with right hemisphere damage performed normally. Specifically, four patients with left hemisphere damage showed a classic selective deficit where metaphor comprehension was severely impaired while literal sentence comprehension remained intact. The findings also revealed that metaphors vary in difficulty depending on their grammatical form, with nominal-entity metaphors being the most difficult for patients.
Methodology
To test the neural bases of figurative language, researchers compared 40 patients with chronic, unilateral focal lesions to twenty neurologically healthy older adults. Within the patient group, 20 patients had left hemisphere injuries and 20 patients had right hemisphere injuries. Participants completed a multiple-choice test to match the meaning of 60 literal-metaphor sentence pairs.
Limitations
The study cannot rule out the potential involvement of certain brain areas that were not represented in this patient sample, such as the left superior parietal cortex or the right inferior temporal cortex. Additionally, the metaphors utilized in the experiments were only moderately familiar, meaning the results might not apply to highly novel or completely unfamiliar metaphors that could require different neural processing. The study design also relies on patients with chronic, focal injuries, meaning these findings may not generalize to acute-stage stroke patients whose brains have not yet undergone reorganization.
How this study connects
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