The manuscript that we finished: structural separation reduces the cost of complement coercion.

Sometimes the intended meaning of a sentence cannot be composed from the meanings of its words and the syntactic relations between them but instead must be attained in a less well specified manner such as adopting a figurative interpretation. Psycholinguists have extensively debated how the processing of such semantically complex expressions is related to the processing of more literal language. An early account of figurative-language processing was the standard pragmatic model (Grice, 1975; Searle, 1979), which was characterized by psycholinguists as an indirect-access model (e.g., Clark & Lucy, 1975; Janus & Bever, 1985; for reviews, see Glucksberg, 1991, 2001, 2003). According to the indirect-access model, the processing of semantically complex expressions involves the following steps: (1) the comprehender computes the literal meaning of an expression using the stored meanings of lexical entries; (2) the comprehender determines whether the literal meaning of the expression seems appropriate in the broader sentence context or whether it instead seems “defective” (Searle, 1979); and (3) if the literal meaning is defective, the comprehender searches for an alternative meaning. The indirect access model thus predicts longer processing times for nonliteral or noncanonical expressions, compared to literal expressions. Although the indirect-access model received some early empirical support, later studies found that semantically complex meanings can be computed rapidly given a sufficiently supportive context (Gerrig & Healy, 1983; Frisson & Pickering, 1999; Inhoff, Lima, & Carroll, 1984; Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, & Antos, 1978; Shinjo & Myers, 1987) and in some cases may be activated before a literal interpretation (Gildea & Glucksberg, 1983; Glucksberg, Gildea, & Bookin, 1982; Keysar, 1989). Given these findings, the indirect-access model was challenged by a direct-access model (Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs & Gerrig, 1989; Glucksberg, 1991, 2003), according to which comprehenders use contextual information to immediately select the intended meaning of a word or expression, so that priority in processing is not necessarily given to either the literal or semantically complex interpretation. While these findings led many psycholinguists to see the indirect-access model as discredited, a number of studies investigating a variety of figurative language forms have continued to produce patterns of results that are consistent with its prediction that semantically complex expressions should take more time to process than literal expressions (e.g., Coulson & Van Petten, 2002, 2007; De Grauwe, Swain, Holcomb, Ditman, & Kuperberg, 2010; Dews & Winner, 1999; Filik & Moxey, 2010; Giora, Fein, & Schwartz, 1998; Honeck, Welge, & Temple, 1998; Lai, Curran, & Menn, 2009; Lowder & Gordon, 2012, 2013; Schwoebel, Dews, Winner, & Srinivas, 2000; Tartter, Gomes, Dubrovsky, Molholm, & Stewart, 2002; Temple & Honeck, 1999). These findings indicate that evidence about processing time does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the indirect-access model (cf. Gluscksberg, 1991, 2003), though they do leave open the possibility that other mechanisms might account for the effects. Further, the key features of the indirect-access model have been incorporated into explanations of a different type of semantic complexity—complement coercion.