Metaphor Comprehension: A Connectionist Approach to Implications for the Mental Lexicon

The growing body of research on metaphor interpretation demonstrates a need for a psycholinguistic model of word meaning that is both more detailed and more flexible than those heretofore described in the psycholinguistic or cognitive science literature. Recent work in connectionist models for representing information suggests such a lexical model, a biologically more plausible one, which accommodates within the same framework both literal and figurative language and yields the appropriate contextual and rhetorical effects. Within the model, massive arrays of low-level representations interact to interpret a given expression within a given context.