The Graded Salience Hypothesis is a theory regarding the psycholinguistic processing of word meaning, specifically in the context of irony, developed by Rachel Giora.
It assumes that priority is given in the psychological activation and semantic retrieval of salient over less salient meanings inside the mental lexicon in the process of language comprehension.
[2] That said, the degree of salience of a given word meaning cannot be viewed as a permanent, defining characteristic, but rather as a function of a number of psycholinguistic factors, such as frequency, conventionality, familiarity, and prototypicality.
The more frequent, conventional, familiar, or prototypical a given word meaning is, the greater degree of salience it holds.
[4] In the view of the graded salience hypothesis, context has a very limited role.