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Abstract
It is not conclusively known whether or not metaphor comprehension requires special processing strategies. Two experiments investigated participants' processing strategies when dealing with verbal information that ranged from literal to metaphorical in response time sentence verification and cue-specific retrospection tasks. In Experiment 1, participants verified true (category typicality) or literally false ("Jobs are jails") sentences for either literal truth or metaphoricity. Scrambled metaphors (randomly recombined subjects and predicates of metaphors) consumed the most reaction time regardless of instructional set. Analysis of cue-specific retrospections revealed that, when asked to explain decisions regarding literal truth or metaphoricity, similarity-based and knowledge-based judgments increased in the metaphoricity set. In Experiment 2, response time sentence verification instructional sets alternated from literal truth to metaphoricity to literal truth in a within-subject design. A reinstatement effect was obtained, thereby demonstrating that distinct processing strategies were used depending on the sentence type under scrutiny and instructional set orientation.