Descriptive norms for 245 Italian idiomatic expressions

Abstract

The present study reports descriptive normative measures for 245 Italian verbal idiomatic expressions. For each of the idiomatic expressions the following variables are reported: Length, Knowledge, Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Predictability, Syntactic flexibility, Literality and Compositionality. Syntactic flexibility was assessed using five syntactic operations: adverb insertion, adjective insertion, left dislocation, passive and movement. The psycholinguistic relevance of each dimension, their measures and the correlations among them are provided and discussed. The databases are freely available for down-loading from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/. Keywords Idiomatic expressions . Descriptive norms . ItalianIdiomatic expressions are usually characterized as linguistic expressions whose meaning is not a direct function of the meanings of their components: according to the syntax of English, the figurative meaning of kick the bucket ("to die") cannot be derived by combining the meaning of kick, the, and bucket. As a consequence, the comprehension and production of these expressions are not adequately explained by standard models of language comprehension and production, which typically rely on the principle of semantic compositionality. In fact, they call for specific models, and much research has been conducted to elucidate how idioms are recognized and produced in their citation

Norms and comprehension times for 305 French idiomatic expressions

“…According to Conner et al, in the same way as for single words, older adults experience retrieval difficulty with idioms. A potential weakness of the procedure used by Tabossi et al (2011) is that, since it is a somewhat difficult and time-consuming task, the possibility cannot be excluded that certain participants may have answered that they did not know the definition of an idiom to avoid having to produce a definition. However, in Tabossi et al's (2011) study, this phenomenon did not occur, as the reliable correlation found between familiarity and knowledge (.49) suggests.…”

“…Tabossi et al (2011) used this original procedure in Italian participants. They had to explain the meaning of each idiom they knew, but not if they were unfamiliar with an item.…”

“…In normative studies of idiomatic expressions, the instructions for collecting familiarity norms sometimes relate specifically to the participant's degree of familiarity with each idiomatic expression, independently of whether or not he/she knows its meaning (Tabossi et al, 2011), or relate to the subjective frequency with which comprehenders encounter an idiom in its written or spoken form, regardless of their familiarity with the actual meaning of the phrase (Libben & Titone, 2008). Although these measures are certainly closely related, in our study, we thought it appropriate, following Titone and Connine (1994b), to distinguish between the participant's own knowledge of the meaning of an idiom and the subjective frequency of the idioms, defined as the frequency with which the participants think that they have encountered an idiom in its written or spoken form (also independently of their personal knowledge of its meaning).…”

“…However, as of yet, only a few studies have been specifically dedicated to the collection of norms for idiomatic expressions. Such norms are available in English (Cronk, Lima, & Schweigert, 1993;Libben & Titone, 2008;Titone & Connine, 1994b) and in Italian (Tabossi et al, 2011). As was mentioned above, as far as French is concerned, we are aware of only one study that has reported norms for 300 idiomatic expressions (Caillies, 2009).…”

“…However, this is less frequently the case for longer linguistic items such as phrases, sentences, and idiomatic expressions. An idiomatic expression comprises several words whose overall meaning (figurative meaning) is in some way different from the meanings of its constituent parts, or in other words, the meaning of a given expression is not a direct function of its components (Tabossi, Arduino, & Fanari, 2011). For instance the French idomatic expression casser sa pipe ("to kick the bucket") means "to die," and thus its global meaning is far from the meaning of its components, which, taken separately, literally mean "to break (casser) his/her (sa) pipe (pipe)."…”