A study examining readers' ability to infer consequences backward and forward from events described in stories is described. Results show that backward consequence inferences are more reliably drawn during the course of reading than forward consequence inferences. (MSE)

The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…