Processing of literal and metaphorical meanings in polysemous verbs: An experiment and its methodological implications

This paper discusses methodological issues related to the implementation of experimental studies that investigate the processing of literal and metaphorical expressions. The first and central aim of the paper is to discuss methodological questions arising from current experimental research on figurative language, such as use of heterogeneous stimuli and their suitability for investigating research questions related to the processing of figurative language. At the center of the methodological discussion is the contextual and cognitive dominance of literal and metaphorical meanings in polysemous words as an important variable in experimental research on figurative language. In this paper, we discuss its importance and propose a possible way of controlling for this variable. The second aim of this paper is to present experimental results that complement the methodological discussion and show that metaphor processing in polysemous words (i.e. very conventionalized figurative meanings) is not necessarily more difficult or special in comparison to processing of literal language if the stimuli are properly balanced. In this paper, we suggest a way to design stimuli that are balanced both in terms of traditional lexical measures as well as dominance of the literal and metaphorical meanings retrieved from corpus data.