Literal and figurative interpretations are computed in equal time BRIAN

The construction of a figurative interpretation for a string like Some surgeons are butchers (Gildea & Glucks-berg, 1983) has been traditionally viewed as subordinate to the construction of a literal interpretation. What Cacciari and Glucksberg (1994) refer to as the standard view of figurative processing—a view that largely stems from Searle (1979) and Grice (1975)—contends that a figurative interpretation is signaled by the failure to construct a plausible literal interpretation. According to this serial approach to figurative comprehension, listeners/readers first attempt to construct a literal interpretation for a figurative string, seeking a figurative interpretation only after a literal reading is found to be implausible. outline several problems with the traditional view. First, specifying the grounds on which readers reject a literal interpretation in favor of a figurative interpretation has proved to be difficult. Clear counter examples can be found to proposals that readers detect syntactic and semantic anomalies (e. or seek to determine the truth value of an interpretation with respect to a mental model (see, e.g., Miller, 1979). Often, as Black (1979) notes, a nonliteral reading is signaled simply by the banality of the literal reading. Second, readers may not fully derive a literal interpretation in all circumstances. For familiar idioms and indirect requests, readers appear to truncate a literal interpretation when the figurative (or indirect) interpretation is salient (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Gibbs, 1980). Finally, when both literal and figurative readings are contextually appropriate, Keysar (1989) has argued that readers compute both interpretations. On the traditional view, processing should be restricted to a literal interpretation, since it provides a sufficient interpretation of the string. More direct tests of the traditional view are provided by on-line measures of the time needed to compute literal and figurative interpretations. A figurative interpretation should be associated with longer processing times, if its construction depends on first deriving an anomalous literal interpretation. Unfortunately, extant results are somewhat mixed. Several studies have found comparable reading times for figurative and literal strings when the prior context sufficiently cues the appropriate interpretation, but reliably longer reading times for figurative strings when slower processing times for figurative strings, even when an informative context preceded a required metaphoric reading (for a review, see Cacciari & Glucksberg, 1994). Reading times (eye movement tracking or various self-paced reading measures) provide a relatively natural and unintrusive measure of processing time. However, reading time differences can result from a confluence of factors, …