Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

“…Reports that literal and nonliteral language comprehension display a similar time course and recruit a similar set of neural generators are consistent with a number of modern models of metaphor comprehension (Coulson and Matlock, 2001, Gibbs, 1994, Giora, 1997, Glucksberg, 1998). Coulson's (2000) model also makes predictions for comprehension difficulty, predicting a gradient of processing difficulty related to the extent to which comprehension requires the participant to align and integrate conceptual structure from different domains.…”

Young People’s Perception of Hate Speech

“…Our present analysis is grounded on the concept of salience (Giora 1997(Giora , 2003, which is often described as the primary contributing factor in the production and interpretation of lexical units and phrases. Since "salient meanings are processed automatically […] irrespective of contextual information" (Giora 2003: 24, our italics), salience is linked with the relative importance of a concept in a language user's memory.…”

Processing Metaphors in the Elderly: Does Valence Matter?

“…Many theoretical models and studies on metaphor comprehension indicate that metaphors appearing frequently in speech are processed differently than unconventional ones. For example, the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, 1997(Giora, , 2002 claims that it is not the metaphorical character of an expression but its saliency which determines how easy (or difficult) it is to process. According to Giora (1997), only new metaphors are processed differently than literal language: While in the case of conventional metaphors the figurative meaning is processed before the literal, with new metaphors, activating the literal meaning before the figurative is more likely (review e.g.…”