The Symmetry Control in Tests of the Standard Pragmatic Model: The Case of Proverb Comprehension

In the standard pragmatic model of figurative language comprehension, literal meanings are constructed first and then used to develop figurative meanings (e.g., Searle, 1979). Although this multistage assumption implies that literal meaning should be comprehended faster than figurative meaning, it is contraindicated by much of the literature. The area has been plagued, however, by a confounding of linguistic materials with experimental conditions. This confounding was bypassed in this study by using the symmetry control procedure, which entails a symmetrical relation between pairs of contexts for utterance pairs that are figuratively synonymous. For proverbs, this means that one proverb is literally related to one context but figuratively related to the other, whereas the other proverb has the converse relation. Participants read short paragraphs that were followed by proverbs and judged whether the proverb was an appropriate restatement of the theme of the paragraph. The reaction time to make this judgme...