Pre-conference workshops
15th June 2026
Preconference workshops will take place on June 15 and will be organized in two parallel sessions (with two 4-hour workshops in the morning and two 4-hour workshops in the afternoon). Participation is free but limited, see Registration page.
Metaphor development (trends and tools)
Dr. Chiara Pompei, Elena Didoni
Metaphor acquisition draws complex developmental trajectories, deeply intertwined with other cognitive and socio-cognitive skills. This makes metaphor competence a
multifaceted ability, and its investigation constitutes a challenge in both typical and atypical development.
This workshop examines the development of receptive and expressive metaphor skills from early phases to later applications for conceptual and social purposes. Building on recent research in developmental pragmatics, a practical session will train the audience on the use of the main assessment and intervention tools. The workshop also provides an overview of statistical approaches that capture the non-linear nature of developmental data.
Computational approaches to metaphors
Dr. Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro, Veronica Mangiaterra, Ginevra Martinelli
This workshop will present potential applications of Distributional Semantics (DS) and the state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to metaphor research. We will first explore how DS can quantitatively describe the relationships between source and target domains in metaphorical mappings, and how this measure relates to human-based ratings of metaphorical properties (e.g., familiarity, acceptability). We will then learn how LLMs can reliably identify metaphors and metaphorical language in textual corpora, enabling large-scale, quantitative analyses of figurative expressions, also across languages. Both sessions will include hands-on practical sessions of data analysis (no coding skills required).
The neurobiology of metaphor
Dr. Federico Frau, Dr. Chiara Battaglini, Riccardo Venturini
Thirty years after the first neuroimaging study on metaphors (Bottini et al., 1994), what do we know about how the brain understands figurative meanings, and what unsolved challenges do we face when we approach the neurobiological architecture of metaphors?
In this workshop, we will provide an overview of the studies that revealed the network of brain regions supporting metaphor understanding and the neurochronometry of specific linguistic processes linked to it, emphasizing cutting-edge experimental paradigms and neuroimaging techniques used to investigate the pragmatic brain in vivo. The workshop will also include a practical section, focusing on the analysis of the neurophysiological response to metaphors, from the acquisition of the signal during a prototypical neurolinguistic experiment to the extraction of event-related potentials and their neural sources.
Metaphors in clinical contexts
Dr. Biagio Scalingi, Fortunata Romeo, Alessia Tavars
Metaphor comprehension represents a key component of pragmatic competence, which has a significant impact on an individual’s quality of life. In this workshop, we will illustrate the metaphor comprehension profiles of patients across a range of clinical conditions, neurological and psychiatric. In addition, we will address metaphor production as a useful tool for gaining insights into a patient’s perspective about the illness condition. Examples of metaphors produced by patients with psychiatric and neurological conditions will be discussed, illustrating how metaphor use can provide an unobtrusive window into their subjective experience. A practical section dealing with the administration and scoring procedures of the Physical and Mental Metaphor task (Bambini et al., 2020) will also be scheduled.
The RaAM specialised seminar is organized by the Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics Lab at IUSS Pavia and is supported by the ERC project “PROcessing MEtaphors: Neurochronometry, Acquisition and DEcay” (PROMENADE). The seminar is organized in collaboration with the RaAM association and with endorsement from XPRAG.it
E-mail address for information about the conference: raamseminar2026@iusspavia.it
