title: Stimulus needs are a moving target: 240 additional matched literal and metaphorical sentences for testing neural hypotheses about metaphor.
abstract: As the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor has evolved, so too have the theoretical questions of greatest interest. To keep pace with these developments, in the present study we generated a large set of metaphoric and literal sentence pairs ideally suited to addressing the current methodological and conceptual needs of metaphor researchers. In particular, the need has emerged to distinguish metaphors along three dimensions: the grammatical class of their base terms, the sensorimotor features of their base terms, and the syntactic form in which the base terms appear. To meet this need, we generated nominal metaphors (and matched literal sentences) using entity nouns as the base terms, with the intention that they be used in concert with already published sets of predicate metaphors or nominal metaphors using event nouns. Using the results of three norming experiments, we provide 120 pairs of closely matched metaphoric and literal sentences that are characterized along 14 dimensions: 11 at the sentence level (length, frequency, concreteness, familiarity, naturalness, imageability, figurativeness, interpretability, ease of interpretation, valence, and valence judgment reaction time), and three related to the base term (visual, motion, and auditory imagery). These items extend previously published stimuli, filling an extant gap in metaphor research and allowing for tests of new behavioral and neural hypotheses about metaphor.
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, B51, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6241, USA. eica@mail.med.upenn.edu.|Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA. eica@mail.med.upenn.edu.
authors.forename: Eileen R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Cardillo
authors.affiliation: Moss Rehabilitation Hospital, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Watson
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, B51, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6241, USA.|Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
authors.forename: Anjan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
mesh_terms: D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000592:standards*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019365:Metaphor; D012015:Reference Standards; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Figurative language comprehension; Nominal metaphors; Sentence norms