An experimental study of metaphor comprehension

There are two theories of metaphor comprehension that assume (1) base and target in a metaphor are processed simultaneously (Alignment-first model); (2) properties of base are projected to target (Abstraction-first model). We conducted an experiment which replicates Gentener & Wolff (1997)\u27s experiment 1 with Japanese equivalents. In experiment 2,We showed that similar result is also found with literal comparison sentences. Correlational analysis of RT data suggested that more detailed analysis of processes is needed