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This study investigated the hypothesis that people with multiple language skills have different language‐acquisition strategies than do people with single language skills. Multilingual and monolingual subjects learned a miniature linguistic system incorporating a reference world under instructions to “memorize” or instructions to “discover rules”. Although there was no clear evidence that multilinguals were superior in language learning abilities overall, multilingual subjects were found to be more able to adjust their learning strategies according to the requirements of the task.

The authors examined how people determine the contextual appropriateness of idioms. In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages. In Experiment 2, idioms in a prototypical temporal sequence were more meaningful than idioms in sentences that violated the temporal sequence. In Experiment 3, idioms referring to the same stage of a conceptual prototype were differentiable on the basis of conceptual information. The conceptual coherence between idioms and contexts facilitated the processing speed of idioms in Experiment 4. Experiment 5 showed that speakers can recover the underlying conceptual metaphors that link an idiom to its figurative meaning. Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.

In three experiments, we examined why some idioms can be lexically altered and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John buttoned his lips about Mary can be changed into John fastened his lips about Mary and still mean "John didn't say anything about Mary"), whereas other idioms cannot be lexically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket, meaning "John died," loses its idiomatic meaning when changed into John kicked the pail). Our hypothesis was that the lexical flexibility of idioms is determined by speakers' assumptions about the ways in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of the three experiments indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as less disrupted by changes in their lexical items (e.g., go out on a branch) than were nondecomposable idioms (e.g., kick the bucket) when their individual words were altered (e.g., punt the pail). These findings lend support to the idea that both the syntactic productivity and the lexical makeup of idioms are matters of degree, depending on the idioms' compositional properties. This conclusion suggests that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items, but share many of the properties of more literal language.Idiomatic phrases in English differ in the degree to which their lexical items can be changed and still maintain their figurative meanings. For example, the word button in the idiomatic phrase button your lip (meaning ••don't say anything") can be changed to fasten your lips without disrupting the figurative meaning of the expression. Similarly, the phrase eat one's words can have its verb changed without disrupting its overall figurative interpretation (i.e., swallow one's words). Idioms such as button your lips and eat one's words seem to be lexically flexible, in that their individual components can be altered without significant damage to their nonliteral meanings. Other idiomatic phrases seem to be lexically frozen, in that changing any of their individual components severely disrupts their figurative meanings. For instance, speakers can say kick the bucket to mean "die," but they cannot say kick the pail or even punt the bucket without losing the idiomatic sense of the expression.Our purpose in this paper is to present evidence in support of a hypothesis explaining exactly why some idioms are lexically flexible and others are not. We suggest that the lexical flexibility of idioms is not an arbitrary phenomenon, but depends specifically on how the internal semantics of these phrases relate to their overall figurative interpretations.