Finding features, figuratively

Object concepts refer to unique clusters of properties that can be selectively activated or inhibited depending on what information is currently relevant. This conceptual “stretching” enables limitless new meanings to be generated, and figurative language provides a useful framework in which to study this conceptual flexibility. Here we probe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension of novel metaphors as a means of understanding the conceptual flexibility inherent to language processing more generally. We show that novel metaphor comprehension involves the activation or inhibition of conceptual properties that are either relevant or irrelevant to the metaphor, and that left inferior frontal gyrus is recruited in this process, supporting a role for this region in the fine-tuning of conceptual meaning. Our results are consistent with a flexible, compositional account of conceptual structure in which semantic control mechanisms operate over conceptual properties during figurative language comprehension in order to create context-dependent meaning.