Abstract
In this exploratory study, we investigated whether and to what extent individual differences in cognitive and personality variables are associated with spoken idiom comprehension in context. Language unimpaired participants were enrolled in a cross-modal lexical decision study in which semantically ambiguous Italian idioms (i.e., strings with both a literal and an idiomatic interpretation as, for instance, break the ice), predictable or unpredictable before the string offset, were embedded in idiom-biasing contexts. To explore the contributions of different cognitive and personality components, participants also completed a series of tests respectively assessing general speed, inhibitory control, short-term and working memory, cognitive flexibility, crystallized and fluid intelligence, and personality. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that online idiom comprehension was associated with the participants' working memory, inhibitory control and crystallized verbal intelligence, an association modulated by idiom type. Also personality-related variables (State Anxiety and Openness to Experience) were associated with idiom comprehension, although in marginally significant ways. These results contribute to the renewed interest on how individual variability modulates language comprehension, and for the first time document contributions of individual variability on lexicalized, high frequency multi-word expressions as idioms adding new knowledge to the existing evidence on metaphor and sarcasm.
Highlights
Idioms still represent a challenge to theories of language processing after more than 40 years from the first psycholinguistic study on idiom comprehension (Bobrow and Bell, 1973)
Idiomatic expressions have gained the attention of several researchers out of the community of figurative language scholars mostly because what was initially seen as an oddness—the fact that idioms convey a figurative interpretation not fully determined by a compositional syntactic and Individual Differences in Idiom Comprehension semantic analysis of their component words—is considered an interesting aspect that must be explained by language processing models
In order to reduce variability, data points ±2 SDs from the mean response time of each participant were excluded from the analyses (1.3%)
Summary
Idioms still represent a challenge to theories of language processing after more than 40 years from the first psycholinguistic study on idiom comprehension (Bobrow and Bell, 1973). Idiomatic expressions have gained the attention of several researchers out of the community of figurative language scholars mostly because what was initially seen as an oddness—the fact that idioms convey a figurative interpretation (and some of them a literal meaning as well) not fully determined by a compositional syntactic and Individual Differences in Idiom Comprehension semantic analysis of their component words—is considered an interesting aspect that must be explained by language processing models. Idioms are somewhat “special” in that they behave at the same time as partially compositional string of words (as any other piece of language) and as non-compositional string of words: while the meaning of a sentence is obtained by merging individual word meanings as the message unfolds, in idiomatic sentences what must be merged comprises unitary sequences of co-occurring words (Cacciari and Corradini, 2015). When idioms have a wellformed literal meaning (e.g., break the ice), the reader/listener has to decide between competing interpretations favoring the one contextually relevant and inhibiting already processed and irrelevant information associated to individual word meanings
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