Abstract
Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first experiment showed greater interference between idioms with the same syntactic structure, demonstrating that idiom representations contain syntactic information. The second experiment indicated that the literal meaning of an idiom is active during production. These syntactic and literal-semantic effects on idiom errors argue against a representation of idioms as noncomponential lexicalized phrases. In the final experiment, no differences were found between decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting that the lexical representation of these two types of idioms is the same.
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The experiments reported here are part of the first author’s master’s thesis presented to the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS 90-09611, SBR 94-11627) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011). Portions of the work were presented at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, in 1994.
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Cutting, J.C., Bock, K. That’s the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blendsß. Memory & Cognition 25, 57–71 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197285
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197285