Herbert L. Colston & Albert N. Katz (eds.), Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xi, 347. Hb $89.95.

The field of psycholinguistics has a history of ignoring sociocultural factors and, to a lesser extent, figurative language. By choosing to focus on both, this book deals simultaneously with two relatively marginalized areas of language processing. This fact alone makes the book an important and welcome contribution. Excluding the first chapter (an overview by one of the editors, Herbert Colston), the book contains twelve articles that cover a range of figurative language phenomena and a host of sociocultural variables. The phenomena discussed include irony, metaphor, and proverbs; the variables include gender, occupational roles, and social status.