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It is an established fact that idiomatic expressions are fast to process. However, the explanation of the phenomenon is controversial. Using a semantic judgment paradigm, where people decide whether a string is meaningful or not, the present experiment tested the predictions deriving from the three main theories of idiom recognition-the lexical representation hypothesis, the idiom decomposition hypothesis, and the configuration hypothesis. Participants were faster at judging decomposable idioms, nondecomposable idioms, and clichés than at judging their matched controls. The effect was comparable for all conventional expressions. The results were interpreted as suggesting that, as posited by the configuration hypothesis, the fact that they are known expressions, rather than idiomaticity, explains their fast recognition.

The present study reports descriptive normative measures for 245 Italian verbal idiomatic expressions. For each of the idiomatic expressions the following variables are reported: Length, Knowledge, Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Predictability, Syntactic flexibility, Literality and Compositionality. Syntactic flexibility was assessed using five syntactic operations: adverb insertion, adjective insertion, left dislocation, passive and movement. The psycholinguistic relevance of each dimension, their measures and the correlations among them are provided and discussed. The databases are freely available for down-loading from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/. Keywords Idiomatic expressions . Descriptive norms . ItalianIdiomatic expressions are usually characterized as linguistic expressions whose meaning is not a direct function of the meanings of their components: according to the syntax of English, the figurative meaning of kick the bucket ("to die") cannot be derived by combining the meaning of kick, the, and bucket. As a consequence, the comprehension and production of these expressions are not adequately explained by standard models of language comprehension and production, which typically rely on the principle of semantic compositionality. In fact, they call for specific models, and much research has been conducted to elucidate how idioms are recognized and produced in their citation

In this longitudinal study we analyse the early phases of reading development in Italian and explore the transition from phonological to lexical reading. A group of 28 Italian children was tested in four phases. Language and cognitive skills were first assessed in the preschool. Reading performance was then tested in three different sessions, in grade 1 and 2, using off-line naming tasks. To identify lexical reading we included in our test Italian words that have atypical stress assignment and can be pronounced with fluent prosody only by using lexical look up. Our findings show that phonological reading develops from aloud conversion of small orthographic units (e.g., single graphemes) to aloud conversion of whole strings. Such development underlies a systematic expansion of lexical reading. Children who deployed lexical reading for a low percentage of words at the end of grade 2 were likely to rely on grapheme by grapheme conversion still at the end of grade 1. Phonological, lexical, visual attention, and orthographic memory skills contribute to the systematic development of lexical reading

Three experiments tested the main claims of the idiom decomposition hypothesis: People have clear intuitions on the semantic compositionality of idiomatic expressions, which determines the syntactic behavior of these expressions and how they are recognized. Experiment 1 showed that intuitions are clear only for a very restricted number of expressions, but for the majority of idioms, they are not consistent across speakers. Experiment 2 failed to support the claim that semantic compositionality influences the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that idioms are more quickly recognized than their literal counterparts, regardless of compositionality and syntactic flexibility. All of the findings were at odds with the tenets of the idiom decomposition hypothesis. The theoretical implications of the results with respect to idiom processing and the notion of compositionality are discussed.