Keeping literal meaning alive? Eye-tracking insights into metaphor processing

Metaphor comprehension constitutes a central challenge in pragmatics, reflecting the complex interplay between literal and figurative meaning. Despite extensive theorizing, the precise mechanisms – how, where and when literal meaning is activated and integrated during online comprehension – remain largely unexplored. This eye-tracking study investigates the impact of metaphor conventionality on real-time processing. Participants first read contextual information and then a target sentence – literal, conventional metaphor or novel metaphor – responding in a go/no-go paradigm if the sentence was meaningful. Response times were recorded and eye-tracking captured fixation count and duration, dwell time, dwell count and regressions across verb, subject, complement, sentence and context AOIs. Novel metaphors elicited more and longer fixations, increased dwell time and more regressions, particularly on the verb, whereas conventional metaphors patterned with literal sentences. Findings seem to support an interactive account of metaphor comprehension, suggesting literal meaning is actively maintained and selectively exploited in novel metaphor comprehension.