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Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage
Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva
[Figurative Thought and Language 11] 2021
► pp. 307–338

Psycholinguistic approaches to figuration

| University of Birmingham

Figurative language provides a testing bed for language processing in general, since it requires speakers to utilize a sophisticated range of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive skills to derive an appropriate interpretation. The toolkit of psycholinguistics, where precise measurements of behavioural responses help to build a model of underlying cognitive processes, can enrich our understanding of this complex topic. Two techniques that have been fruitfully applied to the study of figurative language are cross-modal priming and eye-tracking. Drawing on a range of example studies from the literature, this chapter will demonstrate how figurative language research can benefit from the application of psycholinguistic techniques. It concludes with a consideration of how experimental results can be interpreted against existing theories and models.

Keywords: psycholinguistics, experimental methods, reaction times, cross-modal priming, eye-tracking, visual world paradigm, figurative language, idioms, metaphors, metonymy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Meaning activation and cross-modal priming
    • 2.1Investigating figurative processing using cross-modal priming
    • 2.2Interacting variables in idiom processing
    • 2.3Cross-modal priming and metaphor processing
    • 2.4Other approaches to priming in the study of figurative language
  • 3.Resolving meaning in context: The use of eye-tracking
    • 3.1Eye-tracking and the ‘idiom superiority effect’
    • 3.2Figurative vs. literal meaning in idiom processing
    • 3.3Eye-tracking and the processing of metaphor and metonymy
    • 3.4Individual differences in the processing of figurative language
    • 3.5The importance of familiarity and conventionalization in figurative processing
    • 3.6Eye-tracking in other contexts
  • 4.Conclusions
    • 4.1Implications for theories of figurative processing
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.11.10car
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