How to kick the bucket and not decompose: Analyzability and idiom processing

Abstract

Idiomatic phrases differ in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms are highly decomposable with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., pop the question can be decomposed into pop meaning “suddenly make” and the question referring to “a marriage proposal”). Other idioms are nondecomposable because it is difficult to see any relation between a phrase's individual components and the idiom's figurative meaning (e.g., the parts of kick the bucket do not independently contribute to the figurative meaning of the phrase “to die”). The present studies investigated the role of analyzability or semantic decomposition in idiom processing. We expected that nondecomposable idioms should be processed more quickly than decomposable phrases because expressions such as kick the bucket are lexicalized and should be easier to access from the mental lexicon. However, Experiment 1 showed that nondecomposable idioms were processed more slowly than analyzable idiom phrases. Experiment 2 and 3 indicated that previous research demonstrating a processing advantage for syntactically frozen idioms was due to their degree of semantic decomposition. The results of these experiments suggest that idioms are initially processed in a compositional manner similar to understanding of more literal language. However, people still do not necessarily analyze the literal meanings of idioms during understanding of these figurative phrases.