Exactly how contextual information constrains the processing of lexical and structural information has been an important topic of research since the 1970s. Lexical access should not be affected by top down feedback from higher non-lexical information such as world knowledge.
Contextual processes interact only with the output of the lexical processor.
They influence integration of the output of the lexical processor with the text representation, selecting the contextually compatible meaning while suppressing the contextually incompatible meanings. The salient meaning of a word or an expression is its lexicalized meaning, i.e., the meaning directly retrievable from the mental lexicon. The present paper tests the various hypotheses, focusing on irony comprehension.