Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Name-mentioning constructions as in "This person is called a wine connoisseur" can give rise to two distinct meanings: a literal or a non-literal, ironic reading. This investigation presents empirical evidence from a self-paced reading study that analysed the reading times for target nominals in sentential constructions using predicates like 'call' and 'refer to as' in German. The target words were either simplicia or compounds with a high or low lexical frequency. The study revealed that the mean reading time for non-literal target words is longer as opposed to literal conditions and that compounds are preferred in name-informing conditions while simplicia are processed faster in ironic sentences.