Exploring the relationship between individuals’ speed of processing and their comprehension of spoken idioms

Abstract

In two crossmodal lexical decision experiments we investigated the time course of idiomatic meaning activation for Italian participants listening to spoken idioms. Participants were grouped into fast and slow groups on the basis of their speed of correct response to visually presented targets associated with idioms that were auditorily presented. Participants whose mean lexical decision times were below the 45th percentile were considered slow participants and those whose mean lexical decision times were above the 55th percentile were considered fast participants. The results of Experiment 1 showed that slow and fast participants decided equally quickly the lexical status of the target words associated with predictable idioms. In contrast, whereas the slow participants responded to target words presented during predictable idioms more quickly than to target words presented during nonpredictable idioms, the fast participants responded equally quickly to targets presented during predictable and nonpredictable idioms. When a response deadline was introduced (Experiment 2), fast and slow participants activated the idiomatic meaning of nonpredictable idioms equally quickly, as reflected by the lexical decision times for the target words associated with idioms of this type. The results are interpreted in the light of current models of spoken idiom comprehension.