The Role of Syntactic Variability and Literal Interpretation Plausibility in Idiom Comprehension

Mancuso, Azzurra; Elia, Annibale; Laudanna, Alessandro; Vietri, Simonetta

doi:10.1007/s10936-019-09673-8

Cited by 16 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Activation of respective multi-word representations triggers expectation of individual words that are part of these multi-word expressions. Here, we do not preclude a certain flexibility of these multi-word representations, but propose rather a strong coherence between the words of which they are composed (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Geeraert, Baayen, & Newman, 2017; Kyriacou et al, 2020; Mancuso et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In some accounts, the linguistic system is assumed to store formulaic sequences as larger units and to process them holistically (e.g., Jackendoff, 2002; Swinney & Cutler, 1979; Wray, 2005). According to this account, formulaic sequences have their own lexical entry comparable to “long words.” More recently, other accounts emphasize the internal syntactic and semantic structure of these multi-word expressions (e.g., Kyriacou, Conklin, & Thompson, 2020; Mancuso et al, 2020; Marantz, 2005; Snider & Arnon, 2012; Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006; Tremblay & Baayen, 2010). While parsers are indeed sensitive to phrase frequencies, they access representations of all individual constituents in a phrase simultaneously (Arnon & Christiansen, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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“…Here, the inserted adjective renewed suggests that the difficulty had occurred and been dealt with before, or equally, that a new difficulty arose following a previous one. Modified idioms have recently attracted interest in psycholinguistics ( Omazic, 2008 ; Dronov and Bochaver, 2014 ; Haeuser et al, 2020 ; Kyriacou et al, 2020 ; Mancuso et al, 2020 ), but we still know very little about the way they are processed. The present study aims to address this by comparing the processing of canonical idioms and idioms modified by adjectives, exploring whether modified idioms benefit from a processing advantage relative to matched literal phrases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It further assumes that these factors may interact or weigh in at different points during processing. For example, greater frequency and familiarity may lead to early idiom recognition, while literal plausibility may delay recognition due to the (equal) viability of the literal meaning of the phrase ( Titone and Libben, 2014 ; Mancuso et al, 2020 ), and transparency may affect idiom processing at later stages (i.e., after the phrase offset). However, studies have shown that high literalness facilitates rather than hinders idiom processing ( Mueller and Gibbs, 1987 ; Cronk and Schweigert, 1992 ; Beck and Weber, 2020 ), but an effect of transparency is less conclusive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Idiom Advantage Comes Up Short: Eye-Tracking Canonical and Modified Idioms

2021

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The literature on idioms often talks about an “idiom advantage,” such that familiar idioms (spill the beans) are generally processed faster than comparable literal phrases (burn the beans). More recently, researchers have explored the processing of idiom modification and while a few studies indicate that familiarity benefits the processing of modified forms, the extent of this facilitation is unknown. In an eye-tracking study, we explored whether familiar idioms and modified versions with 1 or 2 adjectives {spill the [spicy, (red)] beans} are processed faster than matched literal phrases {burn the [spicy, (red)] beans} when both were preceded by a biasing context. The results showed that adjectives inserted in idioms induced longer fixations and were more likely to elicit a regression. However, idiom verbs and final words were processed with the same ease in all adjective conditions, implying that modifying idioms did not impede their processing. In contrast to the widely reported “idiom advantage,” the results demonstrated that canonical and modified idioms were slower to read relative to matched literal controls. This was taken to reflect the competition between an idiom’s literal and figurative meaning, and subsequently the need to select and integrate the contextually appropriate one. In contrast, meaning integration in literal, unambiguous phrases was easier. We argue that processing costs associated with meaning selection may only manifest when idioms are preceded by a biasing context that allows disambiguation to occur in the idiom region, and/or when literal control phrases are contextually appropriate and carefully matched to idioms. Thus, idiom recognition/activation may elicit the well attested idiom advantage, while meaning selection and integration may come at a cost, and idiom modifications may simply add to the cognitive load.

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“…The manifestation of the anthropological attribute in idioms is designed to facilitate the perception of meaning by the listener and reduce the likelihood of the need to verify the speaker's intention. Such an attribute is actualized through referral to a specific set of the object's properties; these, in turn, can be represented by the linguocultural models associated with the corresponding denotation, a specific anthropological function associated with the action/state/quality in question, or an inference drawn from the idiom's pragmatic and linguistic components (Mancuso et al, 2020).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguopragmatic Aspect Of Idiomatic Expressions In English Business Discourse

Malyuga¹,

Александрова²

2020

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences

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The Role of Syntactic Variability and Literal Interpretation Plausibility in Idiom Comprehension

Cited by 16 publications

References 44 publications

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

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

When the Idiom Advantage Comes Up Short: Eye-Tracking Canonical and Modified Idioms

Linguopragmatic Aspect Of Idiomatic Expressions In English Business Discourse

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