Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose a novel process account for how verb metaphors (e.g., The boat waddled) are understood: they are processed as analogical comparisons between the event denoted by the verb and an event schema activated by the noun. We first review evidence that this account is consistent with findings in analogical reasoning and both literal and metaphoric sentence comprehension. Next, we report the results of an online study of verb metaphor comprehension that supports our claims. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for theories of metaphor processing and language change over time.