Metaphor comprehension deficit in schizophrenia with reference to the hypothesis of abnormal lateralization and right hemisphere dysfunction Madhushree Chakrabarty a,⇑,1 , Sharmila Sarkar b , Amita Chatterjee c , Malay Ghosal d , Prathama Guha d , Milind Deogaonkar e a Department of Neurology, Bangur Institute of Neurosciences, Kolkata, West Bengal, India b Department of Psychiatry, Calcutta National Medical College, Kolkata, West Bengal, India c School of Cognitive Science, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India d Department of Psychiatry, Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata, West Bengal, India e Center for Neuromodulation, Department of Neurosurgery, Wexner medical center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA article info Article history: Received 13 September 2013 Accepted 16 January 2014 Keywords: Metaphor Lateralization Right hemisphere Schizophrenia Context Saliency abstract Sixteen patients with schizophrenia are presented with ‘literal’, ‘conventional metaphor’, ‘novel metaphor’ and ‘unrelated’ expressions in minimal and sentence contexts. In both contexts, these patients have greater difficulty in processing conventional and novel met- aphor expressions than in processing literal expressions. However, in the sentence context, performance improves significantly for conventional metaphors as compared with that for novel metaphors. The results are interpreted in the light of Rachel L.C. Mitchell and Tim J. Crow’s theory of abnormal lateralization and right hemisphere dysfunction in schizophre- nia. The difficulty in processing metaphors in general and novel metaphors in particular may be due to right hemisphere dysfunction in schizophrenic patients. Interestingly, ‘task difficulty’ is found to be an important parameter modulating metaphor comprehension in patients with schizophrenia and, therefore, may also be a crucial factor in deciding the hemispheric bias of metaphor processing. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Difficulty in processing metaphorical meaning has been argued to be a unique trait in patients with schizophrenia. This trait is not found in patients with related psychiatric disorders such as schizotypal personality disorder (Langdon and Coltheart, 2004). In a study conducted by De Bonis et al. (1997), subjects were asked to detect a metaphor similar or contrary to a proverb with an abstract meaning, through a two-condition forced-choice response task. The subjects with schizophre- nia were found to be impaired in both conditions. Other researchers too observed similar deficits of metaphor comprehen- sion in schizophrenic patients (Anand et al., 1994; Drury et al., 1998; Iakimova et al., 2006b; Kircher et al., 2007; Langdon et al., 2002; Mashal et al., 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.01.002 0388-0001/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 (0) 94338 60226; fax: +91 (0) 33222 36677. E-mail address: madhuchakisi@yahoo.co.in (M. Chakrabarty). 1 Previous affiliation: School of Cognitive Sciences, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Language Sciences 44 (2014) 1–14 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci