Are literal and nonliteral utterances processed differently or do they follow the same
comprehension routes? Relying on intuition, we might expect them to differ. Recent findings …

In this study I lest the prevalent Claims among contemporary psycholinguists that
understanding metaphor does not involve a special process, and that it is essentially …

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a new look at the continuing debates in
psycholinguistics over what is special about figurative language use. Figurative language …

What role does literal meaning play in language comprehension? This question has been
vigorously debated in research on figurative language understanding. The standard …

Verbal irony (eg,'Oh fantastic, there is no queue at all') and understatement (eg,“There
seems to be a bit of a queue”) perform similar pragmatic functions because they both make …

Instead of postulating the priority of literal meaning (see eg, Grice, 1975; Searle, 1979), the
present paper adduces evidence in support of the priority of salient meanings (for a similar …

A fascination with nonliteral language, how it works and what effects it has on hearers and
readers, goes a very long way back. In the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was …

This study provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that language comprehension
involves 2 separate mechanisms that run in parallel: a linguistic mechanism and a …

Findings of three experiments are consistent with the graded salience hypothesis (Giora,
1997), according to which salient meanings should be processed initially before less salient …

Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, ie, as nonfigurative, coded, fully
compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977 …