2020
DOI: 10.1177/0023830920943625
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Activation of Literal Word Meanings in Idioms: Evidence from Eye-tracking and ERP Experiments

Abstract: How the language processing system handles formulaic language such as idioms is a matter of debate. We investigated the activation of constituent meanings by means of predictive processing in an eye-tracking experiment and in two ERP experiments (auditory and visual). In the eye-tracking experiment, German-speaking participants listened to idioms in which the final word was excised ( Hannes let the cat out of the . . .). Well before the offset of these idiom fragments, participants fixated on the correct idiom… Show more

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Cited by 19 publications
(19 citation statements)
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“…All classes of people and common to both standard and non-standard speech use them. An idiom is also stated as a common word or phrase that means something different from its literal translation (Hubers et al, 2020;Kessler et al, 2020). The meaning in idiom also can not be understood from the dictionary definitions of each word taken.…”
Section: A Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…All classes of people and common to both standard and non-standard speech use them. An idiom is also stated as a common word or phrase that means something different from its literal translation (Hubers et al, 2020;Kessler et al, 2020). The meaning in idiom also can not be understood from the dictionary definitions of each word taken.…”
Section: A Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Idioms and other types of formulaic language consistently show a processing advantage over novel sequences in normal readers (Ashby et al, 2018;Conklin & Schmitt, 2008;Kessler et al, 2020;Siyanova-Chanturia et al, 2011;Siyanova-Chanturia & van Lancker-Sidtis, 2019).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The design of the current study, because it presents idiom continuations visually, necessarily elicits literal activation of individual idiom components that might not be activated during normal idiom comprehension. Kessler et al (2020) addressed this issue in a similar study: They played idioms with the final words missing and asked participants to select the appropriate continuation from a set of words displayed on a screen. They found increased looks to words that were semantically related to the correct idiom-final word compared to unrelated words (let the cat out of the BAG/BASKET/ARM/STOM-ACH), and pointed out that these looks could have been an epiphenomenal effect of the visual presentation.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Each array was accompanied by one of three possible sentence fragments, consisting of a biasing context clause and a final clause with the last word missing; participants were instructed to click on the image that best completed the sentence (see Kessler et al, 2020, for a similar design). Final clauses could be completed to form either literal or figurative phrases (e.g., "turn the" can be completed literally as "turn the car" or figuratively as "turn the tables").…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%