Idioms and metaphors help speakers express abstract inner experiences—especially emotions—by linking them to familiar sensory and cultural images. This review brings together 10 studies (1996–2022) using norming databases, self-paced reading, fMRI, and corpus analysis to explain how figurative language is processed in English, German, and Cantonese. Overall, comprehension follows a hybrid pattern: familiar and more literal-sounding expressions are easier to integrate in context, while strongly figurative items tend to feel more emotionally intense and engage embodied neural systems (including emotion-related regions such as the amygdala). Norm resources (PANIG, COMETA, MIST) also show modality-based affective trends, with visual metaphors leaning more positive and tactile ones more negative. Cross-cultural findings reveal shared body-part metaphor structures that can be used to support second-language teaching.

idioms; metaphors; psycholinguistic norms; emotional processing; figurative language; embodied cognition; cross-cultural linguistics

Beck, S. D., & Weber, A. (2020). Context and literality in idiom processing: Evidence from self-paced reading. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 49, 837–863. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-09719-2

Citron, F. M. M., Cacciari, C., Kucharski, M., Beck, L., Conrad, M., & Jacobs, A. M. (2016). When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and affective norms of 619 idioms for German (PANIG). Behavior Research Methods, 48, 91–111.

Citron, F. M. M., et al. (2019). Idiomatic expressions evoke stronger emotional responses in the brain than literal sentences. Neuropsychologia, 131, 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.05.020

Citron, F. M. M., Lee, M., & Michaelis, N. (2020). Affective and psycholinguistic norms for German conceptual metaphors (COMETA). Behavior Research Methods, 52, 1056–1072.

Gibbs, R. W., Jr., Bogdanovich, J. M., Sykes, J. R., & Barr, D. J. (1997). Metaphor in idiom comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.2506

Kövecses, Z., & Szabó, P. (1996). Idioms: A view from cognitive semantics. Applied Linguistics, 17(3), 326–355. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/17.3.326

Leung, D. Ch., & Peter, C. (2011). Cantonese and English bodies do talk: A cross-cultural, metaphor–metonymy study on body-part idioms. In Researching Chinese Learners (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299481_3

Libben, M. R., & Titone, D. A. (2008). The multidetermined nature of idiom processing. Memory & Cognition, 36, 1103–1121. https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.6.1103

Müller, N., Nagels, A., & Kauschke, C. (2022). Metaphorical expressions originating from human senses: Psycholinguistic and affective norms for German metaphors for internal state terms (MIST database). Behavior Research Methods, 54, 365–377.

Rafatbakhsh, E., & Ahmadi, A. (2019). A thematic corpus-based study of idioms in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 4, Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-019-0076-4