Is the ability to produce metaphor a sole product of the right hemisphere?

Hill, J.*, Pickett, C.*, Kurczek, J., & Duff, M. C. (2012, July). Is the ability to produce metaphor a sole product of the right hemisphere? Poster presentation at the University of Iowa Summer Undergraduate Research Conference, Iowa City, IA.

• Often thought to be restricted to the 1lowery language of literature, metaphor is in fact ubiquitous in daily language (Coulson, 2007). Metaphor used to express emotions and abstract concepts and our everyday understanding and communication of thoughts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).

• Neuropsychological studies of language have historically focused on contributions of the left hemisphere to language but more recently the contributions of right hemisphere have been documented.

• Damage to the right hemisphere will often cause right hemisphere syndrome whose symptoms include: 1) inattention 2) spatial reasoning problems, and 3) non-linguistic and paralinguistic problems.

• Patients with ight hemisphere damage (RHD) also have impairments in the use of 1igurative (Brownell 1984) and divergent semantic processing and 1igurative language (Schmidt, 2007). However, this remains disputed as neuroimaging studies have been inconclusive.

• Here we investigate the contribution of the RH to metaphor production using a novel coding procedure and predict that since the RH contributes to the use of 1igurative language, patients with RHD will produce less instances of 1igurative language.