This paper presents an empirical study of visual and verbal metaphors which aims to identify and discuss differences and similarities with respect to modality. First of all, the authors maintain that visual modality impacts comprehension processes and that this finding could explain the effectiveness of visual metaphors in communication. Their study also shows that visual and verbal metaphors activate similar cerebral regions, indicating the multimodal nature of metaphor processing. Additionally, at a more general level, their analyses suggest that the process of language comprehension contains multimodal elements and that it is based on connection mechanisms derived from structural combinations of various processes.