Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal and multimodal metaphors by using item pairs where stimulus one was always a word (e.g., "language" in the metaphorical conditions and…

Critics of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) argue that metaphors are produced and understood as novel meaning creations, and often note that other factors may account for some of the ways people use and understand metaphors apart from entrenched metaphorical concepts, or conceptual metaphors. This article situates CMT within the multidisciplinary…

An evaluation of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) offered by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in this issue suggests a number of important opportunities for future research that may be based on interesting research findings produced over the past 3 decades in response to CMT. This reply to Gibbs argues that the main question for discourse processing remains…

To its credit, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has drawn significant attention to the question of what figurative language can tell us about human concepts. However, the answers CMT theorists have offered are typically unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, and occasionally unfalsifiable. This reply to Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.'s positive…

A major revolution in the study of metaphor occurred 30 years ago with the introduction of "conceptual metaphor theory" (CMT). Unlike previous theories of metaphor and metaphorical meaning, CMT proposed that metaphor is not just an aspect of language, but a fundamental part of human thought. Indeed, most metaphorical language arises from…