Abstract
Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activation of individual words during the processing of opaque idioms. In two primed word naming experiments, Dutch native speakers silently read sentences word by word and then named the last word of the sentence. This target word was embedded in either an idiomatic or a literal context and was expected and correct in this context (COR), semantically related (REL) to the expected word, or unrelated (UNREL) to the expected word. The correct target word in the idiomatic context was always part of an opaque idiom. Faster naming latencies for the idiom-final noun than for the unrelated target in the idiomatic context indicated that the idiom was activated as a whole during processing. In addition, semantic facilitation was observed in the literal context (COR < REL < UNREL), but not in the idiomatic context (COR < REL = UNREL). This is evidence that the idiom-final noun was not activated at the meaning level of representation. However, an inhibitory effect of orthographic word frequency of the idiom-final noun indicated that the idiom-final noun was activated at the form level. These results provide evidence in favour of a hybrid model of idiom processing in which the individual words and the idiom as a whole interact on form and meaning levels of representation.
Highlights
There is a long-standing tradition of research on idiom processing in psycholinguistics
Using a word naming task, we investigated to what extent individual words at the end of sentences are activated semantically and orthographically during the processing of opaque Dutch idiomatic expressions
In an idiomatic sentence context, where word semantics do not contribute to the figurative meaning, correct target words were responded to faster than targets related in meaning or unrelated
Summary
There is a long-standing tradition of research on idiom processing in psycholinguistics. Even if an idiomatic expression is stored as a whole, it is still composed of parts: namely, its individual words. This leads to the question of how processing is affected by the relation between those parts (words) and the idiomatic expression as a whole. For instance, an idiomatic expression that can be literally interpreted: “to kick the bucket.”. The meaning of the target word “bucket” must be integrated in the literal meaning of the phrase as a whole. How quickly and smoothly this can be done will co-depend on lexical properties of the word “bucket”, for instance, its word frequency.
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