Psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions

Abstract

This study provides psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions. A total of 965 Spanish native speakers rated the idioms in 7 subjective variables: familiarity, knowledge of the expression, decomposability, literality, predictability, valence and arousal. Correlational analyses showed that familiarity has a strong positive correlation with knowledge, suggesting that the knowledge of the figurative meaning of an idiom is highly related to its frequency of use. Familiarity has a moderate positive correlation with final word predictability, indicating that the more familiar an idiom is rated, the more predictable it tends to be. Decomposability shows a moderate positive correlation with literality, suggesting that those idioms whose figurative meaning is easier to deduce from their constituents tend to have a plausible literal meaning. In affective terms, Spanish idioms tend to convey more negative (66%) than positive meanings (33%). Furthermore, valence and arousal show a quadratic relationship, in line with the typical U-shaped relationship found for single words, which means that the more emotionally valenced an idiom is rated, the more arousing it is considered to be. This database will provide researchers with a large pool of stimuli for studying the representation and processing of idioms in healthy and clinical populations.

Bridging the Gap: Creation of a Lexicon of 150 Pairs of English and Italian Idioms Including Normed Variables for the Exploration of Idiomatic Ambiguity

“…It should now be pointed out that the most popular design in idiom norming studies is the between-subject one, where different groups of participants evaluate a single variable or a group of them, after which the data are aggregated (see, among others, Citron et al, 2016;Gavilán, Haro, Hinojosa, Fraga, & Ferré, 2021;Tabossi et al, 2011;Titone & Connine, 1994).…”

The Elephant in the Room: A Systematic Review of Stimulus Control in Neuro-Measurement Studies on Figurative Language Processing

“…To have all possible influence factors rated in advance of a study is therefore an unrealistic expectation. However, there are specific metaphor and idiom databases in many languages, such as English (e.g., Cardillo et al, 2010Cardillo et al, , 2017Nordmann et al, 2014), German (e.g., Citron et al, 2016aCitron et al, , 2020aMüller et al, 2021), Italian (Bambini et al, 2014), Spanish (Gavilán et al, 2021), Bulgarian (Nordmann and Jambazova, 2017), French (Bonin et al, 2013(Bonin et al, , 2018, Chinese (Li et al, 2016), and Dutch (Hubers, 2019). Figurative stimuli and scores of influence factors can be extracted from these databases and used in empirical research on figurative language.…”

Stand in someone’s shoes: Propuesta didáctica sobre idioms y análisis en grupos bilingües y no bilingües de Secundaria

“…El aprendizaje de conceptos abstractos como los idioms, símiles y metáforas están supuestamente conectados con el hemisferio derecho del cerebro, en el cual tienen lugar y se desarrollan diferentes procesos relacionados con el lenguaje no literal. Varios estudios del campo de la psicolingüística han investigado acerca del aprendizaje de idioms y proverbios y su adquisición cognitiva, además de su representación mental (Nayak y Gibbs, 1990;Glucksberg, 2001;Libben y Titone, 2008;Crespo y Góngora, 2012;Gavilán et al, 2021). Dichos estudios evalúan, entre otras cosas, si (a) la gente conceptualiza ciertos temas a través de las metáforas, y (b) si estos conceptos metafóricos ayudan a que la gente comprenda el sentido literal de lo que varias expresiones tanto idiomáticas como metafóricas pretender desarrollar (Gibbs, 1998).…”