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

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 …

When people understand expressions that are intended nonliterally, two kinds of meaning
are simultaneously apprehended: the literal meanings of the words themselves and the …

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 …

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 …

The 7 articles in this collection describe new views of figurative language understanding.
These articles differ in the types of figurative language they examine and address different …

The traditional view in pragmatic theory is that a distinction exists between what speakers
say and what they mean, communicate, or implicate in context. For example, when uttering …

Three experiments investigated the role of authorial intentions in metaphor comprehension.
In these studies, subjects read metaphoric (eg,“A family album is like a museum”), literal …

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several
important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought …