Figurative language comprehension is the cognitive process through which a listener or reader interprets an expression whose intended meaning cannot be recovered by simply substituting the most literal dictionary meaning for each word. It involves recognizing conventional expressions, activating relevant concepts, combining linguistic and situational context, and constructing an interpretation appropriate to the speaker's communicative purpose. A familiar idiom such as “break the ice” can identify an attempt to ease social tension; a metaphor such as “The argument is a maze” invites a listener to organize an abstract situation through selected relations associated with a more concrete one. The exact sequence of operations varies with familiarity, predictability, conventionality, discourse context, and the individual comprehender. Glucksberg (2003)00040-2); Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
The central scientific question is how linguistic meaning becomes contextually appropriate meaning. Metaphors and idioms provide a revealing test because they connect lexical knowledge, compositional interpretation, semantic memory, conceptual relations, prediction, pragmatic inference, and real-time language processing. Research rejects a universal assumption that the mind must always finish a literal interpretation before beginning a figurative one. Familiar figurative expressions may become available rapidly, whereas novel expressions can call for extensive relational integration. Distinct experimental paradigms sometimes appear contradictory because they capture different stages of comprehension or compare expressions with different properties. Giora (1997); Bowdle and Gentner (2005).
This article examines the psychological mechanisms and evidence for understanding metaphors and idioms, including their developmental course, individual differences, experimental measurement, and neural correlates. Irony, proverbs, hyperbole, and metonymy appear as comparisons that clarify what figurative comprehension does and why its forms should be investigated separately. The focus is ordinary human language processing; clinical diagnoses, formal pragmatic theory, language disorders, and the metaphysics of artificial intelligence retain their own scientific and editorial questions.
What Counts as Figurative Language?
Figurative language describes uses of linguistic expressions in which conventional word meaning, sentence meaning, or an immediately literal interpretation does not exhaust the communicated meaning. The category comprises multiple mechanisms rather than one uniform mental operation. Metaphor relates distinct domains or conceptual categories; idioms are relatively fixed expressions with learned, sometimes noncompositional meanings; irony can communicate an attitude toward a discrepancy between words and circumstances; hyperbole deliberately uses scalar exaggeration; metonymy shifts reference through a salient association. These phenomena differ in what must be retrieved from memory, compared, inferred, or evaluated in social context. Morsanyi and Stamenković (2021); Kalandadze et al. (2018).
Metaphors, similes, and comparisons
A metaphor characterizes one subject in terms of another: “Her explanation was a bridge.” Comprehension involves identifying the intended relation or category, such as establishing a connection between previously separated ideas. The bridge's physical characteristics do not all transfer. Its weight, material, and geographic location may be irrelevant, while connection, access, and transition become salient. A simile makes a comparison explicit—“Her explanation was like a bridge”—but explicit comparison words do not guarantee that its processing mechanism is the same in every context. Conventional metaphors, creative metaphors, and extended discourse metaphors can engage different patterns of retrieval and construction. Bowdle and Gentner (2005); Glucksberg (2003)00040-2).
Metaphorical interpretation is selective. A source domain contributes properties or relations that a reader judges relevant to the target and the local communicative goal. Metaphor can be understood through relational alignment, category formation, contextual enrichment, or combinations of these operations. Calling an interview “a minefield” generally foregrounds risk and the consequences of a mistaken step, not an intention to describe buried explosives. A person familiar with the phrase may retrieve that interpretation quickly, while someone encountering it for the first time can reach a similar meaning through discourse evidence.
Idioms and formulaic expressions
An idiom is a conventional multiword expression with an established meaning that may be partly or largely unpredictable from its individual words. “Spill the beans” commonly means disclose a secret. “See the light” may be metaphorically interpretable from component meanings, while highly opaque idioms depend more heavily on learning the whole expression. Idioms lie along several separable dimensions: familiarity, frequency, predictability, syntactic flexibility, literal plausibility, semantic transparency, and decomposability. An expression can be familiar yet opaque, or unfamiliar yet transparent enough for a reader to infer its meaning. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9); Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
Some idioms can also be read literally. In “The gardener spilled the beans onto the floor,” the literal interpretation is coherent, whereas a preceding story about a concealed plan promotes the figurative reading. Recognizing the same word string therefore does not settle its meaning. The linguistic environment constrains which interpretation is appropriate, and a competent comprehender may retain more than one interpretation temporarily when the context remains ambiguous.
Adjacent forms: irony, hyperbole, proverbs, and metonymy
Irony often depends on detecting a contrast between an utterance and circumstances, together with the speaker's stance. “Wonderful timing,” said after a late arrival, may convey criticism, affection, or amusement depending on the relationship and delivery. Hyperbole, such as “I've told you a thousand times,” works through recognized exaggeration. Proverbs package generalized lessons that must be applied to new situations. Metonymy exploits relations of contiguity or association, as when “the newsroom” refers to its staff or editorial institution. The ability to explain one of these forms does not establish equal competence in the others, and task designs that combine them can obscure meaningful differences. Morsanyi and Stamenković (2021); Kreuz et al. (1999)00010-7).
The Processing Problem: From Words to Intended Meaning
A written or spoken expression unfolds over time. Each word activates multiple kinds of information: pronunciation or orthography, lexical meanings, syntactic expectations, associated concepts, and learned multiword patterns. The comprehender must integrate incoming information with what has already been said, what is known about the world, and what the speaker is likely to be doing. The outcome is a situation-specific interpretation rather than a mechanical translation of lexical entries.
Lexical activation and semantic knowledge
The mental lexicon supports recognition of familiar words and learned expressions. Semantic knowledge supplies concepts and associations that make a metaphor or idiom interpretable. A conventional metaphor can have a sufficiently accessible figurative sense to be retrieved rapidly, while a novel metaphor may require the construction of a relation that has not been stored as a ready-made phrase meaning. Figurative expressions also differ in whether the reader knows the language variety, cultural conventions, or specialized domain in which an expression is used. Consequently, lexical familiarity and semantic knowledge are major explanatory variables, not incidental background factors. Giora (1997); Glucksberg (2003)00040-2).
Understanding “the gears of government” requires knowledge of machines and institutions, but it also requires selection. The hearer maps coordination, friction, or interdependence while excluding most literal machinery details. That selection reflects both the linguistic form and the discourse problem the expression solves. Semantic associations can aid a reader's initial interpretation without uniquely determining the speaker's intended emphasis.
Context, common ground, and pragmatic inference
Context can make a figurative interpretation predictable before the final word appears. A story about an awkward gathering supports the idiomatic interpretation of “break the ice”; a story about a frozen lake makes the literal reading plausible. Discourse context includes preceding sentences, the ongoing topic, knowledge attributed to interlocutors, situational affordances, and prosody in spoken communication. Common ground can affect the social appropriateness and interpretation of nonliteral remarks, as demonstrated in work on verbal irony. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9); Kreuz et al. (1999)00010-7).
Pragmatic inference asks why the speaker selected this expression in this situation. Saying “This deadline is a cliff” can highlight proximity to an irreversible loss; a different context may foreground suddenness or danger. The hearer normally seeks an interpretation coherent with the speaker's communicative action. This inference can become highly practiced for recurrent expressions, so the difference between retrieving and inferring is best understood as graded and interactional rather than categorical.
Prediction and the timing of idiom recognition
Cacciari and Tabossi used cross-modal priming to study when idiomatic meaning became accessible during a spoken phrase. When listeners encountered an idiom whose continuation made its identity recognizable, idiom-related targets were facilitated. When the idiom could not be identified until later, literal word-related activation appeared earlier, and later probes could reveal activation of both kinds of meaning. The pattern supports a recognition point at which the phrase begins to function as an identifiable unit. It does not imply that recognition points are identical across idioms, readers, or contexts. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9).
This is a crucial insight into processing cost. A phrase can be longer or structurally complex yet easy to recognize because its words are expected; another phrase can be short yet demanding because its interpretation remains uncertain. Prediction reduces the space of plausible continuations but can mislead when a speaker intentionally reinterprets an idiom literally or alters its familiar structure.
How Does the Mind Understand Metaphors?
Metaphor comprehension has generated several partly complementary theories. Their disagreements concern how conceptual relations are represented, whether figurative meanings require a special derivational stage, and how processing changes as an expression becomes conventional. Experiments show that these questions must be answered while controlling for expression familiarity, plausibility, lexical associations, and discourse support.
Comparison and relational alignment
Comparison approaches describe comprehension as aligning structured information across two domains. A metaphor is informative when its source provides relations that illuminate the target. In “The committee was an orchestra,” coordinated roles, timing, and leadership may be mapped to members and procedures. The listener evaluates which correspondences are licensed by context. This approach is especially useful for understanding creative metaphors that invite readers to discover a relation rather than to retrieve an established category label. Bowdle and Gentner (2005).
The comparison model predicts that novel metaphors often benefit from explicit cues directing attention toward common relational structure. It also explains why a metaphor can encourage multiple interpretations: an orchestra offers coordination, harmony, discipline, conflict, rehearsal, and performance, and the context selects among them. The relevant resemblance is typically organized around relations, not simply the number of shared surface features.
Categorization and category inclusion
Categorization accounts propose that some metaphors apply a source term as the name of an ad hoc abstract category. When a speaker calls an aggressive negotiator “a shark,” the word can designate the category of ruthlessly predatory agents rather than a sea animal. Comprehension can therefore proceed through inclusion in a contextually constructed category. Glucksberg's account helps explain the speed with which familiar metaphors can be understood and why literal substitution is often unnecessary. Glucksberg (2003)00040-2).
Categorization need not eliminate comparison. A newly coined category can develop from comparison across instances, and habitual categorization may emerge once speakers share the metaphorical sense. The same form can be processed differently at different stages in its linguistic history and by speakers with different experience.
The career of metaphor
Bowdle and Gentner's career-of-metaphor proposal explicitly connects novelty to processing mode. A relatively novel metaphor tends to support comparison between a source and a target; conventionalization permits a more direct categorization interpretation. Their experiments support sensitivity to figurative form and conventionality, but the account should be treated as a model explaining a family of observations rather than a rigid algorithm for every utterance. The model is strongest when novelty and conventionality are independently measured rather than assigned from intuition. Bowdle and Gentner (2005).
A metaphor can also become conventional in one community and remain unfamiliar in another. Technical metaphors in science, figurative vocabulary in games, and culturally specific political metaphors thus provide informative tests. Their processing depends on exposure and the current communicative domain as much as on any dictionary classification.
Graded salience and direct access
Giora's graded-salience hypothesis prioritizes access to salient meanings: those that are familiar, frequent, conventional, or otherwise strongly accessible. A familiar figurative interpretation can be salient; an unfamiliar literal interpretation can be weakly accessible. The theoretical contrast therefore concerns salience rather than a fixed literal-versus-figurative sequence. Glucksberg's review likewise describes evidence that familiar metaphors may be understood rapidly and automatically. These proposals challenge obligatory literal-first accounts without making every novel metaphor instantaneous. Giora (1997); Glucksberg (2003)00040-2).
The phrase “direct access” must be interpreted carefully. It indicates that evidence does not require an obligatory completed literal derivation before figurative comprehension. It does not demonstrate that lexical semantics, contextual integration, or conceptual selection are absent. Even a fast response is the product of a cognitive system with learned expectations and ongoing processing.
Conceptual metaphor and embodied interpretations
Conceptual-metaphor perspectives describe systematic associations between domains, such as movement used to discuss progress or physical containment used to describe psychological states. These descriptions can organize recurring patterns in language and offer hypotheses about how experience supports conceptual structure. Empirically demonstrating that a conventional metaphor occurs across many expressions is different from demonstrating that a particular sensorimotor simulation is causally required for its immediate comprehension. Behavioral interference, neuroimaging, and developmental experiments are needed to test stronger claims. The theoretical language of domain mappings is useful, while the level of representation and causal necessity remain questions for specific experiments.
How Does the Mind Understand Idioms?
Idiom processing requires a theory of how multiword sequences are stored and interpreted. “Kick the bucket” and “pull strings” both have familiar figurative readings, yet differ in transparency, literal plausibility, lexical flexibility, and how naturally their words contribute to the figurative interpretation. Treating all idioms as one undifferentiated class risks drawing false conclusions about processing strategy.
Whole-phrase retrieval
A lexical or noncompositional approach describes an idiom as having a stored whole-phrase representation, in some respects similar to a lexical item. This representation helps explain why highly familiar expressions can be recognized efficiently and why the conventional interpretation of opaque idioms may be available even when their component words offer little explanatory guidance. Recognition remains sensitive to the identity, order, and predictability of the words making up the expression. Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
Stored knowledge does not require a listener to suppress all constituent word meanings. Even when a phrase is recognized as an idiom, lexical activation can proceed, and the literal reading can remain contextually available. A person can laugh at the physical impossibility of “spilling the beans” while fully grasping the idiomatic meaning.
Compositional analysis and decomposability
Compositional accounts explain how constituents may contribute to a figurative interpretation. In “lay down the law,” the individual words offer a recognizable relation to asserting authority. More decomposable idioms allow speakers to connect components to aspects of the figurative meaning, which can aid comprehension and support limited syntactic transformations. Opacity and decomposability should be measured rather than assumed: speakers may disagree about the transparency of an expression, especially when they differ in exposure or language background. Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
A phrase's apparent etymology is not necessarily its online processing route. An idiom may have originated in a comprehensible image while modern speakers retrieve its meaning as a learned sequence. Conversely, a newly encountered phrase may be interpretable from its structure even before it becomes familiar.
Hybrid accounts and parallel sources of meaning
Titone and Connine synthesize evidence for a hybrid view: idioms have lexicalized properties while their parts may simultaneously contribute semantic information. Their eye-tracking findings show that differences in decomposability influence reading behavior. A hybrid account accommodates a central empirical reality: the same string can benefit from stored knowledge and from active analysis in a context-sensitive manner. Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
The practical implication for experimental design is substantial. A study using only familiar, opaque idioms may appear to support storage accounts, whereas one using analyzable expressions in varied discourse may highlight compositional processing. Neither result by itself settles how all idioms are understood. Researchers need item-level norms and models that account for both lexicalized knowledge and flexible inference.
Literal and figurative competition
Some idioms are ambiguous between ordinary literal and figurative readings. A speaker can intentionally “unpack” an idiom, exploit a pun, or insert words that modify its customary interpretation. Such cases show why semantic activation is not always a binary switch. During comprehension, multiple candidates can be partially activated, strengthened, or discarded as information accumulates. Cross-modal priming provides time-sensitive evidence for this interaction, while ordinary final-answer comprehension tasks reveal only the interpretation selected at the end. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9).
What Makes Figurative Language Easy or Difficult?
The processing cost of a nonliteral expression is the additional cognitive demand associated with recognizing or constructing its interpretation under the conditions of a specific task. Cost may appear as slower reading, longer eye fixations, reduced response accuracy, larger electrophysiological responses, or increased activation in neural systems supporting semantic selection and integration. These measures overlap imperfectly. A longer neural response does not directly translate into subjective confusion or communication failure. Hao and Chen (2026); Yang (2014).
Familiarity, frequency, and conventionality
A highly familiar expression often enjoys faster recognition because its meaning and likely continuation are available in memory. Conventionality concerns how established a figurative mapping or use is within a language community; familiarity concerns how familiar an individual is with it. These variables correlate but are not interchangeable. Someone who works in medicine may readily understand a specialized metaphor unfamiliar to a general sample. Experimental comparisons must distinguish whether an observed difference reflects figurativeness, exposure, lexical frequency, or cultural knowledge.
Novelty and creative construction
A novel metaphor asks the comprehender to construct a relation not already established as a conventional lexical sense. Its difficulty depends on relational coherence: a striking but interpretable comparison may be easier than a bizarre pairing without useful conceptual structure. Novel metaphors often impose greater semantic integration demands than familiar ones. A recent ERP meta-analysis found more negative N400 and less positive late positive responses to novel than conventional metaphors, although later-window interpretations remain under investigation. Hao and Chen (2026).
Novelty is not equivalent to linguistic creativity or artistic value. A metaphor can be innovative and readily comprehensible, or familiar and confusing in an unusual context. Independent ratings of novelty, aptness, familiarity, and plausibility are essential for teasing apart these properties.
Contextual support and discourse coherence
Supportive discourse can preactivate relevant concepts and narrow interpretive possibilities. A story that establishes a threatening, high-stakes negotiation prepares a reader for “walking through a minefield.” Without such context, multiple intended attributes compete. Context can particularly help children infer unfamiliar idioms, and experimental research comparing supportive narratives with isolated phrases demonstrates that idiom comprehension develops alongside broader inference and semantic-analysis skills. Cain et al. (2009).
Context can also increase processing demand when a familiar figurative meaning conflicts with the current story. Readers must then adjust an initially favored interpretation. Accordingly, the relationship between context and effort depends on how precisely the discourse supports the intended meaning.
Transparency, decomposability, and predictability
Transparency concerns how readily the figurative meaning can be inferred from constituent words or imagery; decomposability concerns whether components map onto parts of that meaning; predictability concerns how strongly preceding words cue the remainder of the expression. These features often covary but identify different mechanisms. A reader can predict a familiar opaque idiom's ending without understanding its origin. A transparent but uncommon phrase can be inferable despite weak prediction. Cacciari and Tabossi's recognition-point findings and Titone and Connine's decomposability findings together argue for multidimensional stimulus characterization. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9); Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
Prosody, gesture, modality, and speaker intention
Spoken figurative language carries timing, intonation, voice quality, and sometimes gesture. These can help identify a speaker's stance or signal whether an utterance is playful, sarcastic, explanatory, or literal. Written language substitutes punctuation, typography, and wider discourse organization for much of this immediate information. Figurative interpretation also occurs in signed languages, where grammatical structure, spatial expression, and discourse context are integral to language use; a theory confined to written English is therefore methodologically incomplete. The magnitude of prosodic or gestural facilitation cannot be assumed for all metaphors and idioms without direct experimental tests.
Individual knowledge and cognitive resources
Vocabulary, language proficiency, semantic memory, discourse integration, inferential skill, and sometimes executive control contribute to performance. Their relative importance depends on the stimulus and task. In a study of written sarcasm and metaphor, eye movements and individual-difference measures indicated different temporal and cognitive demands across the two forms. Researchers should avoid interpreting every between-person difference as a specific deficit in figurative understanding when variations in language familiarity or task demands can explain it. Olkoniemi, Ranta, and Kaakinen (2016).
How Scientists Measure Figurative Language Comprehension
A good test of metaphor or idiom comprehension does more than count correct explanations. It specifies which stage of comprehension the measure is sensitive to and compares expressions matched on relevant lexical, contextual, and grammatical variables. Since no single method reveals the full cognitive sequence, converging evidence from complementary designs is particularly valuable.
Accuracy and interpretation judgments
Participants may choose the best paraphrase, explain a metaphor in their own words, rate plausibility, or decide whether an idiom fits a story. These tasks are accessible and useful for developmental comparisons, but they conflate meaning access with response formulation, memory, attention, reading ability, and test-taking conventions. A participant can recognize the intended meaning yet struggle to explain it verbally; another can choose the correct option through elimination. Results vary with response format and context. A preregistered review of metaphor comprehension in autism emphasized how varied task formats complicate comparisons. Kalandadze, Bambini, and Næss (2019).
Reaction times and semantic priming
Reaction-time paradigms test whether figurative or literal semantic associates become accessible at a particular moment. In cross-modal priming, an auditory phrase is presented while a visual target appears, and facilitation of responses to related targets indicates activation of the corresponding meaning. By placing probes at different moments, researchers can investigate the recognition point and the persistence of literal or figurative activation. These results are time-sensitive evidence about activation, not direct reports of the interpretation the listener would finally endorse. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9).
Eye movements in reading
Eye tracking records fixation durations, first-pass reading, regressions, and later rereading. Early gaze measures are often sensitive to local lexical and integrative demands, while later measures can reflect discourse-level reanalysis. Metaphors and sarcasm may produce distinct patterns, and idiom decomposability can affect reading rates. Eye movements therefore illuminate the changing allocation of attention, provided researchers avoid assigning a single mental mechanism to every fixation metric. Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9); Olkoniemi, Ranta, and Kaakinen (2016).
EEG and event-related potentials
Event-related potentials measure time-locked electrical responses during comprehension. The N400 is commonly associated with semantic access and integration demands, while later components have been linked to reevaluation or additional integrative processes under some task conditions. In a 2026 meta-analysis synthesizing 22 ERP studies with 627 participants, Hao and Chen reported a more negative N400 for metaphors than literal expressions and a stronger response for novel than conventional metaphors. Late positive-component patterns were less straightforward, especially for conventional metaphors. This evidence supports graded processing costs; it does not identify a single metaphor-specific neural signature. Hao and Chen (2026).
An ERP difference may reflect semantic novelty, predictability, plausibility, contextual fit, or a combination of factors. Studies that call all metaphors difficult by definition build their conclusion into their stimulus selection. More informative designs norm items independently and analyze multiple interacting dimensions.
Functional MRI and network-level evidence
Functional MRI identifies spatial patterns associated with processing conditions, typically by contrasting neural responses to figurative and control expressions. A meta-analysis of 17 fMRI studies reported that right-hemisphere involvement varied with metaphor novelty, sentential context, and task demands. A later activation-likelihood meta-analysis drawing on 30 studies and 480 participants found convergence in left inferior frontal and temporal regions, among other areas, and emphasized right-hemisphere convergence particularly for novel metaphors. These findings support distributed and condition-sensitive language networks rather than a simple claim that metaphor belongs to one hemisphere. Yang (2014); Huang et al. (2023).
Activation differences cannot by themselves establish that a specific brain region is uniquely necessary for metaphor or distinguish effort from meaning construction. Stronger causal inference requires lesion evidence, carefully controlled stimulation studies, or longitudinal converging designs. Even then, neural involvement must be understood relative to the language task and baseline.
Corpus studies, cross-linguistic designs, and computational models
Corpus analyses measure how often figurative strings occur, in which contexts, and with what conventional meanings. Cross-linguistic experiments test whether properties of figurative expression and recognition generalize across languages or depend on local metaphorical conventions. Computational models can formalize how lexical associations, contextual probabilities, or distributed semantic representations predict a particular response pattern. Their outputs become evidence for a psychological mechanism only when independently compared with human behavioral or neural measurements, including generalization beyond training examples.
A language model that produces an accurate idiom explanation demonstrates a linguistic performance under a defined benchmark. Such performance alone does not establish that the model uses a human-like mental lexicon, performs the same inferential operations, or has subjective comprehension. The correct research comparison specifies the computational task, training exposure, generalization test, and correspondence to human measurements.
Development: How Children Learn Figurative Meaning
Figurative competence develops through interactions among vocabulary growth, conceptual knowledge, discourse comprehension, exposure to conventional expressions, and pragmatic interpretation. Children's responses are often strongly influenced by whether an expression is known, whether contextual cues are available, and whether a task asks them to choose an answer or to formulate an explanation. Development is gradual and heterogeneous; one age threshold cannot characterize mastery of metaphor, idiom, irony, and proverb interpretation alike.
Recognizing figurative intent
A child may initially interpret an unfamiliar idiom literally because the words are known while the phrase-level convention is not. With repeated exposure, the child learns both the expression's conventional meaning and the situations in which it is appropriate. This learning depends on rich input and inference from discourse. When a novel idiom occurs in a story that clearly establishes relevant intentions or consequences, even a younger child can infer a plausible figurative interpretation. Cain et al. (2009).
Semantic analysis and story context
Developmental experiments examining children in different age bands found that supportive narrative context and the semantic analyzability of idioms contribute to understanding. Contextual inference can assist relatively young children, while flexible analysis of component meanings continues to improve into later childhood. Importantly, these experiments distinguish learning a known idiom from inferring a novel one: success with familiar phrases could reflect accumulated exposure rather than a general-purpose inference skill. Cain et al. (2009).
Metaphorical relations and educational language
Understanding novel metaphor requires identifying appropriate relations between concepts and suppressing irrelevant literal features. As conceptual knowledge becomes more differentiated, children can interpret figurative expressions in academic explanations, fiction, and argument. Metaphors can help teach an unfamiliar abstraction by using a familiar source, but educational benefit depends on the learner knowing the source and recognizing where the comparison stops. A biological cell described as a “factory” may make organization easier to imagine while also suggesting misleading mechanical equivalences if boundaries are not explained.
Teaching interpretation without turning a skill into a diagnosis
In instruction, teachers can introduce an unfamiliar expression through a short realistic story, ask learners which interpretation fits the surrounding actions, contrast literal and figurative readings, and revisit it in varied contexts. This approach follows the evidence that context and semantic analysis support idiom interpretation. Its effectiveness as a particular educational intervention must be assessed through controlled studies with relevant outcomes; research on processing mechanisms alone does not establish a treatment protocol. Persistent language comprehension concerns call for broader evaluation rather than inference from a single figurative-language test.
Multilingual and Cultural Dimensions
Figurative expressions are shaped by experience within particular linguistic and cultural communities. A metaphor may extend readily across languages, change its salient associations, or become awkward when transferred word for word. Idioms are especially vulnerable to literal translation because their conventional meaning belongs to a learned expression in the target language. Cross-linguistic similarity therefore does not remove the need to examine conventionality and speaker familiarity independently.
First-language and second-language interpretation
Second-language users may recognize an idiom's words while lacking its phrase-level meaning. They may also transfer a known expression from another language, correctly or incorrectly, depending on cross-language overlap. A less familiar figurative expression can invite deliberate decomposition or contextual reasoning even when a highly proficient native speaker retrieves it fluently. Differences among learners often reflect frequency of exposure, domain experience, and access to culturally shared assumptions more than a general inability to reason metaphorically.
Culture and conventionality
Some metaphorical associations reflect recurring experiences with motion, space, and interaction; others rely on particular social practices or culturally learned narratives. Researchers should avoid labeling an unfamiliar expression intrinsically opaque when it is only unfamiliar to the sampled population. Studies need transparent descriptions of language variety, proficiency, exposure, translation decisions, and norming procedures. A metaphor successful in one language can require rephrasing in another to preserve its communicative effect.
Translation and assessment fairness
A translated idiom test may unintentionally change the item's frequency, transparency, syntactic naturalness, or emotional tone. Those shifts affect difficulty even when the intended correct response is nominally unchanged. Assessments therefore require local norming, comparison across groups on basic language ability, and attention to culturally specific knowledge. Cross-linguistic equivalence is a scientific measurement question, not a property guaranteed by translation alone.
Individual Differences and Clinical Research Boundaries
Differences in figurative-language performance can arise from normal variation in vocabulary, reading experience, interpretation style, linguistic background, developmental stage, and task format. Clinical studies can use the same experimental paradigms to characterize how particular populations respond, but task performance is neither sufficient for diagnosis nor a direct measure of one isolated cognitive faculty.
Autism and the role of structural language
A meta-analysis by Kalandadze and colleagues synthesized 41 studies and 45 independent effect sizes, finding an overall group difference in figurative comprehension favoring typically developing comparison groups. Importantly, differences were small and statistically nonsignificant in studies matching groups on language ability, and the magnitude of reported differences varied by figurative type and matching strategy. This pattern highlights how vocabulary and structural language contribute to group comparisons; it cannot establish that every autistic person has figurative-language difficulty. Kalandadze et al. (2018).
More narrowly focused studies complicate any single explanation. A preregistered meta-analysis found a group difference for metaphor tasks while emphasizing substantial variation in stimulus and response formats; a separate meta-analysis of idiom and proverb studies found a moderate difference across studies matched on age and intelligence. An individual study of metaphor comprehension also reported considerable within-group variability and an important role for core language skills. Differences across these analyses partly reflect which tasks, matching criteria, and populations were included. Kalandadze, Bambini, and Næss (2019); Morsanyi and Stamenković (2021); Kalandadze et al. (2022).
These findings motivate individualized assessment of general language and task context instead of stereotypes about literal thinking. Autism-related social communication and language differences are clinical and developmental topics with separate assessment criteria; figurative comprehension is one research dimension within that broader picture.
Aphasia and acquired language impairment
Aphasia can affect the linguistic and semantic resources used to interpret idioms. A systematic review of idiom comprehension in aphasia emphasized variability in participant profiles, stimulus characteristics, and response requirements. The same expression can pose different demands depending on whether the task requires recognition, explanation, or choice among alternatives. Conclusions about a person's communicative abilities require broader speech-language assessment; this scientific article does not establish aphasia diagnostic criteria or treatment recommendations. Lada et al. (2023).
Reading difficulties, attention, and other conditions
Reading accuracy, word recognition, auditory comprehension, attention, and working memory can all affect performance on a figurative-language task. For example, reading-based tests place demands on decoding and fluency that are partly separable from spoken metaphor comprehension. Studies of language development disorders, dyslexia, and other clinical groups must therefore control for the relevant language modality and avoid interpreting low task scores as a unitary deficit. Screening, clinical diagnosis, and evidence-based intervention belong to their specific clinical knowledge domains.
Distinguishing evidence from a clinical recommendation
The established finding is that several interacting language and cognitive skills contribute to figurative interpretation. The evidence is more limited concerning how much any specific training regimen improves generalized figurative comprehension across settings and populations. A child who misinterprets one idiom, an adult who dislikes metaphor, or a multilingual learner unfamiliar with a local phrase cannot be classified clinically from that behavior. Scientific interpretation must consider language history, task demands, everyday function, and alternative explanations.
Interpreting the Evidence: Established Findings and Open Debates
The most dependable findings converge across behavioral and experimental paradigms: familiarity, context, and expression type influence comprehension; idioms can involve both stored phrase knowledge and component-level analysis; and novel metaphors commonly demand more semantic integration than conventional expressions. Evidence is also strong that experiments can produce different results when they vary linguistic materials or ask for different kinds of responses. Cacciari and Tabossi (1988)90014-9); Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9); Hao and Chen (2026).
Established: meaning is sensitive to context and familiarity
Meaning accessibility depends on learned linguistic patterns and their fit with the present discourse. Familiarity can promote rapid figurative understanding, and recognition of an idiom can occur during the phrase rather than after its final word. An expression's literalness or figurativeness by itself explains less than the interaction among contextual support, predictability, and prior knowledge. These statements are supported by classic controlled experiments and later integrative reviews.
Well supported but conditional: graded processing costs
Metaphor processing often differs from matched literal comprehension, especially for novel metaphor. The ERP synthesis by Hao and Chen supports robust N400 differences under the studied designs, but interpretation of late components remains less settled. Neuroimaging syntheses find a distributed set of regions whose recruitment changes with novelty, context, and task. These effects do not justify the claim that all figurative expressions are universally slower than all literal expressions. Hao and Chen (2026); Yang (2014).
Contested: a single literal-first route
Literal-first theories offer one possible processing architecture, but familiar expressions can be understood rapidly enough to challenge an obligatory sequential account. Graded-salience, categorization, comparison, and hybrid idiom models capture different aspects of the evidence. Remaining disputes concern the status and timing of activated candidates, the units represented in memory, and the generalizability of particular experimental manipulations. A productive comparison makes quantitative predictions for the same well-normed materials. Giora (1997); Bowdle and Gentner (2005).
Limited and task-dependent: neural specialization
Metaphor engages ordinary language and integrative systems distributed across the brain; specific contrasts sometimes reveal additional recruitment, particularly for novel expressions. The inference that a unique hemisphere or region is dedicated to figurative meaning is not supported across all conditions. Task differences, linguistic stimuli, baseline selection, and statistical thresholds matter. Studies also cannot directly translate activation magnitude into depth of comprehension. Huang et al. (2023); Yang (2014).
Limited: universal clinical or educational transfer
Clinical meta-analyses document average group differences under specific designs while revealing substantial heterogeneity and confounds involving general language proficiency. Claims that one activity, workbook, or technique reliably improves generalized metaphor comprehension for every learner go beyond these results. Studies of treatment and instruction require separate randomized or carefully controlled evidence, follow-up periods, and outcomes that matter outside the test environment. Kalandadze et al. (2018); Morsanyi and Stamenković (2021).
Why Figurative Comprehension Matters
Figurative expressions compress complex relations into memorable language. In conversation, they permit speakers to characterize an unfamiliar problem using familiar experience, highlight evaluations without listing every reason, and communicate a shared understanding economically. In literature, metaphors can direct attention to unexpected conceptual relations. In education, they provide explanatory resources when the source comparison is carefully bounded. In intercultural communication, they can also generate misunderstanding when an expression is familiar to one person and unknown to another.
A scientifically grounded communication practice is to adapt figurative language to the audience and purpose. When exact procedural interpretation matters, a familiar metaphor can be accompanied by a literal explanation of the relevant point. When creative interpretation is the goal, a novel metaphor can be useful precisely because it permits relational exploration. Neither form is inherently clearer. The optimal expression depends on what the listener knows and what the discourse requires.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is figurative language the same as metaphor?
Metaphor is one type of figurative language. Idioms, irony, hyperbole, proverbs, and metonymy can involve additional or different processing mechanisms. The broad label is descriptively useful, but individual forms should be distinguished in experimental work.
Do people always understand literal meaning first?
No universal literal-first sequence is supported. Familiar nonliteral meanings can be readily accessible; novel expressions may require more deliberate semantic construction. Timing depends on salience, context, phrase recognition, and task demands. Giora (1997); Glucksberg (2003)00040-2).
Why are some idioms easy and others confusing?
Ease depends on familiarity, transparency, decomposability, predictability, literal plausibility, and contextual support. An opaque idiom can become easy through learning; an unfamiliar but transparent idiom may be inferred from its words or the surrounding story. Titone and Connine (1999)00008-9).
How is a novel metaphor understood?
A comprehender identifies useful relations or categories that link the target and source concepts, selecting interpretations appropriate to context. Comparison and categorization are complementary explanatory traditions; the career-of-metaphor theory predicts that their relative contribution changes with conventionalization. Bowdle and Gentner (2005).
Does figurative language require the right hemisphere?
Research implicates distributed systems, with right-hemisphere contributions varying by novelty and experimental context. Meta-analyses do not support a simple single-hemisphere rule. Yang (2014).
Does difficulty with metaphors indicate autism or another disorder?
A single difficulty does not establish a diagnosis. Language knowledge, development, exposure, test format, and other abilities affect performance. Clinical assessment considers a much wider set of developmental and functional evidence. Group-level meta-analytic differences do not determine an individual's profile. Kalandadze et al. (2018).
Can large language models understand idioms?
A model can generate accurate idiom paraphrases and useful metaphorical extensions. Those observable capabilities can be tested. Determining whether its internal operations match human cognitive mechanisms requires separate experiments; generating appropriate language is not evidence by itself of human-like comprehension or subjective experience.
Conclusion
Figurative language comprehension arises from an interaction among lexical learning, semantic representations, context-sensitive prediction, relational construction, and pragmatic interpretation. Metaphors can be processed through comparisons and category formation, with their balance influenced by conventionality. Idioms draw on learned multiword knowledge while sometimes retaining productive component meanings. Context, familiarity, transparency, and task demands determine when interpretation is fast, effortful, or ambiguous. Behavioral timing, eye movements, ERP studies, and neuroimaging establish complementary parts of this account, while methodological heterogeneity sets important limits on broad claims. A mature psychology of figurative meaning therefore studies the particular expression, the particular comprehender, and the communicative situation together.
Related Articles
Cluster Language, Thought and Psycholinguistics — The parent scientific chapter situates metaphor and idiom comprehension within the wider architecture of language processing, semantics, and thought.
Semantic Memory: Facts, Meaning, and Knowledge — Explains the knowledge systems that support familiar word senses, learned idiomatic meanings, and conceptual associations.
Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon: Why Words Feel Just Out of Reach — Examines lexical retrieval, which is related to but distinct from interpretation of figurative expressions.
Dyslexia Across Languages: Orthography and Reading Development — Explains reading-development questions and the need to distinguish word decoding from broader linguistic inference.
Pragmatics in Psycholinguistics: Meaning Beyond Literal Words — how context and speaker intentions contribute to linguistic interpretation.
References
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