Abstract
Written language comprehension requires readers to integrate incoming information with stored mental knowledge to construct meaning. Literally plausible idiomatic expressions can activate both figurative and literal interpretations, which convey different meanings. Previous research has shown that contexts biasing the figurative or literal interpretation of an idiom can facilitate its processing. Moreover, there is evidence that processing of idiomatic expressions is subject to individual differences in linguistic knowledge and cognitive-linguistic skills. It is therefore conceivable that individuals vary in the extent to which they experience context-induced facilitation in processing idiomatic expressions. To explore the interplay between reader-related variables and contextual facilitation, we conducted a self-paced reading experiment. We recruited participants who had recently completed a battery of 33 behavioural tests measuring individual differences in linguistic knowledge, general cognitive skills and linguistic processing skills. In the present experiment, a subset of these participants read idiomatic expressions that were either presented in isolation or preceded by a figuratively or literally biasing context. We conducted analyses on the reading times of idiom-final nouns and the word thereafter (spill-over region) across the three conditions, including participants’ scores from the individual differences battery. Our results showed no main effect of the preceding context, but substantial variation between readers and variation in contextual facilitation. We encourage interested researchers to exploit the present dataset for follow-up studies on individual differences in idiom processing.
Highlights
There are cases where fixed sequences of words, known as instances of formulaic language, carry a meaning that does not emerge from its constituent words and that differ from the literal interpretation of the word sequence (Abel, 2003)
For each of the five constructs, we tested how strongly the tests assumed to measure a given construct loaded on its factor and how much variance was explained (Table 1; see Appendix A for descriptive statistics and reliability measures of each included test and Figure 1 for correlations between the predictor variables)
In contrast to our hypotheses, we observed no main effect of context
Summary
Compositional approaches assume that each constituent word contributes to the meaning of an idiomatic expression (Gibbs & O’Brien, 1990; Cacciari & Glucksberg, 1991, McGlone, Glucksberg, & Cacciari, 1994). Hybrid models (e.g., Titone and Connine, 1999), representing a mixture of lexical representation and compositional accounts, have received a lot of empirical support and are nowadays widely accepted. Such models assume that there are external forces (e.g., idiom frequency, discourse context, language user characteristics) that act upon the precise nature of an idiom’s meaning activation. A good test case for examining the predictions of idiom processing and storage accounts are ‘literally plausible expressions’
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