Metaphors, bilingual mental lexicon and distributional models

While native speakers (NS) might process conventional metaphors mainly on a linguistic level, this is arguably not true for foreign learners (FL). This paper analyses the role that linguistic information plays in processing a word meaning in relation to NS and FL judgments. Since FL generally seem to rely heavily on linguistic contexts for understanding word meanings, the lexical representations emerging from their judgments should correlate well with those emerging from distributional (DSS) analyses based on verbal corpora that incorporate purely linguistic information. However, since DSS representations also encompass metaphorical expressions, the correlation with judgments of FL should drop dramatically when considering words that are typically used in metaphorical expressions. These predictions are confirmed through an extensive quantitative analysis based on experimental data.