In garden path (GP) jokes, a first dominant interpretation is detected as incoherent and subsequently substituted by a hidden joke interpretation. Two important factors for the processing of GP jokes are salience of the initial interpretation and accessibility of the hidden interpretation. Both factors are assumed to be affected by contextual…

Recent lexical decision studies have produced conflicting evidence about whether an object's semantic size influences word recognition. The present study examined this variable in online reading. Target words representing small and large objects were embedded in sentence contexts that were either neutral, congruent, or incongruent with respect to…

This study investigates how epistemic stance is encoded and perceived in face-to-face communication when language is regarded as comprised by speech and gesture. Two studies were conducted with this goal in mind. The first study consisted of a production task in which participants performed opinion reports. Results showed that speakers communicate…

Findings from five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic utterance-interpretations by default. When presented in isolation, novel negative constructions ("Punctuality is not his forte," "Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature"), free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this article we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical…