Inhibition of the Literal: Filtering Metaphor-Irrelevant Information During Metaphor Comprehension

Abstract

When people understand metaphors, irrelevant information must be filtered out; for example, to say that one's lawyer is a shark should not be taken to mean that he or she could breathe underwater. We employed a variant of the independent cue paradigm to determine whether metaphor-irrelevant information is inhibited. Consistent with earlier findings of inhibitory processes in idiom comprehension, we found evidence of inhibition of irrelevant information in metaphor comprehension. We also demonstrated that these inhibitory effects were not attributable to lexical priming per se. Overall, the pattern of data implicates active inhibition as a mechanism for filtering irrelevant information during figurative language comprehension.