Spoken Idiom Recognition: Meaning Retrieval and Word Expectancy

Tabossi, Patrizia; Fanari, Rachele; Wolf, Kinou

doi:10.1007/s10936-005-6204-y

Cited by 33 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…In contrast, the CH assumes that idiom activation is not a continuous process, and does not occur until special elements in an idiom (the idiom key) have been recognized. There are findings in the literature supporting the claim that activation does not spread up to idiom concepts starting from string onset (Tabossi et al, 2005;Tabossi & Zardon, 1993, 1995. However, the present evidence does not discriminate between the two alternatives, and it is compatible with both models.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…This is not to say that they were highly predictable. In fact, their average predictability would be considered low or very low in most of the studies that explored the notion (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988;Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2005;Tabossi & Zardon, 1993, 1995. However, there is a reliable difference between clichés and idioms, and, more importantly, between conventional and control strings.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why are idioms recognized fast?

2009

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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.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why are idioms recognized fast?

2009

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“…At that point the idiom is recognized. In fact, when the initial fragment of a string triggers high expectancy about a final idiomatic conclusion, recognition of a word providing an unexpected (literal) ending is slowed down (Tabossi, Fanari & Wolf, 2005). The point at which the idiom is identified depends on the idiom characteristics (e.g., length, familiarity, semantic transparency, ambiguity) and on previous context, and is usually defined as the word after which the expression becomes highly predictable based on cloze probability values.…”

Section: Processing Idioms: Compositionality and Other Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Basic composition and enriched integration in idiom processing: An EEG study.

Canal¹,

Pesciarelli²,

Vespignani³

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally-plausible idioms (e.g., break the ice) are semantically composed, and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal and idiomatic contexts, while their EEG was recorded. Control sentences only contained the idiom-final word whose cloze values were as high as in literal and idiomatic contexts. Event Related Potentials data showed that differences in the amplitude of a Frontal positivity (PNP) emerged at the beginning and at the end of the idiom strings, with the Idiomatic context condition associated with more positive voltages. The Time-Frequency analysis of the EEG showed an increase in power of the middle gamma frequency band only in the Literal context condition. These findings suggest that sentence revision mechanisms, associated with the frontal PNP, are involved in idiom meaning integration, and that the literal semantic composition of the idiomatic constituents, associated with changes in gamma frequency, is not carried out after idiom recognition

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“…Some strings contain only a content word after the verb (e.g., alzare il gomito/raise the elbow, "drink too much alcohol"), others are much longer (e.g., mettere una pulce nell'or ecchio/put a flea in the ear, "raise suspicion"). Several cross-modal studies have shown that the activation of the figurative meaning of an idiomatic string may occur rather late during the processing of an auditory presented string, and may not yet be available at its offset (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988;Cacciari, Padovani, & Corradini, 2007;Tabossi & Zardon, 1993, 1995Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2005). However, other data seem to contradict these results (Titone & Coninne 1994a;Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2005).…”

Section: Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several cross-modal studies have shown that the activation of the figurative meaning of an idiomatic string may occur rather late during the processing of an auditory presented string, and may not yet be available at its offset (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988;Cacciari, Padovani, & Corradini, 2007;Tabossi & Zardon, 1993, 1995Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2005). However, other data seem to contradict these results (Titone & Coninne 1994a;Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2005). In a recent cross-modal study, verbal idioms were divided into short (i.e., containing only one content word after the verb) and long (e.g., containing more than one content word after the verb).…”

Section: Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Descriptive norms for 245 Italian idiomatic expressions

2010

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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

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Spoken Idiom Recognition: Meaning Retrieval and Word Expectancy

Cited by 33 publications

References 37 publications

Why are idioms recognized fast?

Why are idioms recognized fast?

Basic composition and enriched integration in idiom processing: An EEG study.

Descriptive norms for 245 Italian idiomatic expressions

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