Figurative language processing

This chapter is concerned with visual processing in the context of figurative language. Included is background on research that has used the visual world paradigm to study the processing of fictive motion sentences. These sentences, which are ubiquitous in everyday language, include a motion verb but describe no motion (e.g., “A road goes through the desert”, “The cord runs along the wall”). Also included is discussion of emerging concepts that form novel hypotheses for how figurative language is processed. This chapter grounds fictive motion processing in interactive dynamical systems and takes figurative language in a new direction.