How discourse constraints influence neurolinguistic mechanisms during the comprehension of proverbs

Context can boost activation of non-salient meanings but never at a cost to the activation of the salient meaning. [...]in this model, integrating the salient meaning of highly familiar nonliteral statements, such as the proverb Don t count your chickens before they hatch, into discourse contexts that support the proverbial meaning should always beat least as easy, if not easier, than when the same sentence is presented in contexts biased toward the less salient meaning (i.e., literal) of the proverbs. Specifically, some researchers argue that the different conceptual domains relevant for comprehending a statement tend to be more distant for figurative than for literal statements. Because more distant domains have less conceptual overlap with a target statement than do less distant domains, the resulting differences in overlap should lead to greater conceptual integration difficulty for figurative statements (Blasko, 1999; Coulson & Van Petten, 2002). In a literal-supporting context, the discourse would be conceptually coherent and probably consist of words, such as chicken or birth, whereas in figurativesupporting contexts the topic would not be about chickens or hatching per se. [...]on processing the proverb the comprehender would have to both understand the figurative sense of the proverb and integrate it into information made available by the preceding context, which involves associating the new topic (chickens) with the existing discourse structure built around another more distant topic. [...]these reading time differences appeared within the first few words of the proverbs, findings inconsistent with the standard pragmatic approach.