The notion of literal meaning was once so unproblematic that it would easily fit Arnauld’s description: it was one of those notions that are “so clear that they cannot be explained through others, because there are none which are clearer and simpler than them.” But in our century, its fate has not been different from that of so many other notions previously presumed to be “fundamental ,” and it...

It is well-know that the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) is activated by mental simulation triggered by visual or linguistic stimuli (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002 and many others). However, no study has compared the extent of ACE activated by literal and figurative understanding of honorific Japanese verbs. Two experiments, consisting of 59 Japanese university students was conducted usi...

Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative m...

Based on psychological studies which show that metaphors and other non-literal constructions are comprehended in the same amount of time as comparable literal constructions, some researchers have concluded that literal meaning is not computed during comprehension of non-literal constructions. In this paper, we suggest that the empirical evidence does not rule out the possibility that literal me...

We investigated the time-course of cortical activation during comprehension of literal and idiomatic sentences using MEG and anatomically guided distributed source analysis. Previous fMRI work had shown that the comprehension of sentences including action-related words elicits somatotopic semantic activation along the motor strip, reflecting meaning aspects of constituent words. Furthermore, id...