 So, salience is here a graded phenomenon (see here Giora 2003 for her experimentally supported Graded Salience Hypothesis). Salience is also independent from the literalness of the interpretation: the highly accessible meaning is not always the literal one. According to Giora (2003: 33), ‘literality is not a component of salience’. The latter is caused by experience, frequency of use, and as such is reflected in the accessibility in memory. Her experiments demonstrated that ‘familiar instances of metaphor and irony activated their salient (figurative and literal) meanings initially, regardless of contextual information’ (p. 140).