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Participants read either a metaphorical prime sentence, such as That defense lawyer is a shark, or they read a baseline-prime sentence. The baseline-prime sentence was literally meaningful in Experiment 1 (e.g., That large hammerhead is a shark), nonsensical in Experiment 2 (e.g., His English notebook is a shark), and unrelated in Experiment 3 (e.g., That new student is a clown). After reading the prime sentence, participants verified a target property statement. Verification latencies for property statements relevant to the superordinate category (e.g., Sharks are tenacious) were faster after participants read the metaphor-prime sentence than after they read the baseline-prime sentence, producing an enhancement effect. In contrast, verification latencies for property statements relevant to only the basic-level meaning of the vehicle and not the superordinate (e.g., Sharks are good swimmers), were slower following the metaphor-versus the baseline-prime sentence, producing a suppression effect. As Glucksberg and Keysar's (1990) class inclusion theory of metaphor predicts, the enhancement effect demonstrates that the vehicle of a metaphor stands for the superordinate category of the vehicle, and the suppression effect demonstrates that the metaphorical vehicle does not stand for its basic-level meaning.

Recent findings suggest that infants can remember words from stories over 2 week delays (Jusczyk, P. W., & Hohne, E. A. (1997). Infants' memory for spoken words. Science, 277, 1984-1986). Because music, like language, presents infants with a massively complex auditory learning task, it is possible that infant memory for musical stimuli is equally powerful. Seven-month-old infants heard two Mozart sonata movements daily for 2 weeks. Following a 2 week retention interval, the infants were tested on passages of the familiarized music, and passages taken from similar but novel music. Results from two experiments suggest that the infants retained the familiarized music in long-term memory, and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical contexts within which they were originally learned.

In this paper, we describe the crucial role that suppression plays in many aspects of language comprehension. We define suppression as a general, cognitive mechanism, the purpose of which is to attenuate the interference caused by the activation of extraneous, unnecessary, or inappropriate information. We illustrate the crucial role that suppression plays in general comprehension by reviewing numerous experiments. These experiments demonstrate that suppression attenuates interference during lexical access (how word meanings are 'accessed'), anaphoric reference (how referents for anaphors, like pronouns, are computed), cataphoric reference (how concepts that are marked by devices, such as spoken stress, gain a privileged status), syntactic parsing (how grammatical forms of sentences are decoded), and individual differences in (adult) language comprehension skill. We also review research that suggests that suppression plays a crucial role in the understanding of figurative language, in particular, metaphors, idioms, and proverbs.