Activation of Literal Word Meanings in Idioms: Evidence from Eye-tracking and ERP Experiments

Abstract

How the language processing system handles formulaic language such as idioms is a matter of debate. We investigated the activation of constituent meanings by means of predictive processing in an eye-tracking experiment and in two ERP experiments (auditory and visual). In the eye-tracking experiment, German-speaking participants listened to idioms in which the final word was excised ( Hannes let the cat out of the . . .). Well before the offset of these idiom fragments, participants fixated on the correct idiom completion ( bag) more often than on unrelated distractors ( stomach). Moreover, there was an early fixation bias towards semantic associates ( basket) of the correct completion, which ended shortly after the offset of the fragment. In the ERP experiments, sentences (spoken or written) either contained complete idioms, or the final word of the idiom was replaced with a semantic associate or with an unrelated word. Across both modalities, ERPs reflected facilitated processing of correct completions across several regions of interest (ROIs) and time windows. Facilitation of semantic associates was only reliably evident in early components for auditory idiom processing. The ERP findings for spoken idioms compliment the eye-tracking data by pointing to early decompositional processing of idioms. It seems that in spoken idiom processing, holistic representations do not solely determine lexical processing.

The Figurative Language in David Campbell’s Poem “Night Sowing” and Their Translation into “Menyemai di Malam Hari”

“…All classes of people and common to both standard and non-standard speech use them. An idiom is also stated as a common word or phrase that means something different from its literal translation (Hubers et al, 2020;Kessler et al, 2020). The meaning in idiom also can not be understood from the dictionary definitions of each word taken.…”

As clear as glass: How figurativeness and familiarity impact simile processing in readers with and without dyslexia

“…Idioms and other types of formulaic language consistently show a processing advantage over novel sequences in normal readers (Ashby et al, 2018;Conklin & Schmitt, 2008;Kessler et al, 2020;Siyanova-Chanturia et al, 2011;Siyanova-Chanturia & van Lancker-Sidtis, 2019).…”

Collocational frequency and context effects on idiom processing in advanced L2 speakers.

“…The design of the current study, because it presents idiom continuations visually, necessarily elicits literal activation of individual idiom components that might not be activated during normal idiom comprehension. Kessler et al (2020) addressed this issue in a similar study: They played idioms with the final words missing and asked participants to select the appropriate continuation from a set of words displayed on a screen. They found increased looks to words that were semantically related to the correct idiom-final word compared to unrelated words (let the cat out of the BAG/BASKET/ARM/STOM-ACH), and pointed out that these looks could have been an epiphenomenal effect of the visual presentation.…”

“…Each array was accompanied by one of three possible sentence fragments, consisting of a biasing context clause and a final clause with the last word missing; participants were instructed to click on the image that best completed the sentence (see Kessler et al, 2020, for a similar design). Final clauses could be completed to form either literal or figurative phrases (e.g., "turn the" can be completed literally as "turn the car" or figuratively as "turn the tables").…”