Psycholinguistic approaches to figuration

Figurative language provides a testing bed for language processing in general, since it requires speakers to utilize a sophisticated range of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive skills to derive an appropriate interpretation. The toolkit of psycholinguistics, where precise measurements of behavioural responses help to build a model of underlying cognitive processes, can enrich our understanding of this complex topic. Two techniques that have been fruitfully applied to the study of figurative language are cross-modal priming and eye-tracking. Drawing on a range of example studies from the literature, this chapter will demonstrate how figurative language research can benefit from the application of psycholinguistic techniques. It concludes with a consideration of how experimental results can be interpreted against existing theories and models.