“Going to town”: Large-scale norming and statistical analysis of 870 American English idioms

Bulkes, Nyssa; Tanner, Darren

doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0747-8

Cited by 21 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…For various languages, such as English (Titone and Connine, 1994;Libben and Titone, 2008;Bulkes and Tanner, 2017;Nordmann and Jambazova, 2017), French (Caillies, 2009;Bonin et al, 2013Bonin et al, , 2017, German (Citron et al, 2016), Italian (Tabossi et al, 2011) and Chinese (Li et al, 2016), norms have been published with the aim to increase the reliability of stimulus material in psycholinguistic studies on idioms. These norms provide a number of interesting measures, such as familiarity, decomposability, predictability or emotional valence, for several hundreds of items per language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, idiom norming studies traditionally do not take this factor into account. They usually average across age, often sample from a student population only (e.g., Li et al, 2016), and sometimes do not mention their participants' age at all (e.g., Bulkes and Tanner, 2017). Whether age affects the idiom vocabulary in a similar way as the single-word vocabulary is therefore an open question.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan

2019

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Knowledge of multi-word expressions, such as break the ice, is an important aspect of language proficiency that so far we have known surprisingly little about. For example, it is largely unknown how much variability there is between speakers with respect to the number of different items that they know, or what factors contribute to their acquisition. This lack of knowledge seriously limits the generalizability of experimental studies on the production and comprehension of multi-word expressions (usually idioms) and generally suggests that there still is a sizable unknown territory of language knowledge to explore. Here, we present the results of two familiarity ratings for a large sample of Dutch idioms and a large number of participants that varied in age between 12 and 86 years old. The data show considerable variation between participants and between idioms. Non-linear mixed-effects regression analyses revealed that the age of participants, but not their education, as well as the frequency and decomposability of the idioms influenced the familiarity scores. Our findings suggest that the knowledge of multiword expressions develops across the lifespan, is acquired from exposure, and-in participants younger than about 40 years of age-varies with item decomposability.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan

2019

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“…A significant main effect of phrase type was observed, [ = -0.026, SE = 0.012, t (164) β 9 Twenty-six native English speakers (MTurk workers) rated the literal plausibility of all phrases. The instructions given were identical to the literal plausibility instruction used in Bulkes and Tanner (2017) .…”

Section: Mandarin-english Bilingualsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Investigation of Idiom Processing Advantage using Translated Familiar Idioms

Zhu¹,

Minda²

2020

Preprint

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The facilitatory effect shown in native speakers processing idiomatic phrases compared to matched novel phrases may be explained by a dual route model. This postulates that all phrases are processed literally at first, and if a phrase was recognized as familiar during processing, it would then be processed by a faster retrieval-route; if the phrase was not perceived as familiar, it would continue to be processed literally by the slower computation-route. The goals of the current project were to test the dual route model and to decipher the underlying mechanism in retrieval-route activation. English idioms and translated Chinese idioms were presented to both native English speakers and Chinese-English bilinguals in random order. Participants listened to the idiom up until the last word (e.g., “draw a snake and add”), then saw either the idiom ending (e.g., “feet”) or the matched control ending (e.g., “hair”); to which they made lexical decision and reaction times were recorded. We examined the priming effect for idioms compared to controls across the two language groups. Results showed that the two groups processed idioms of different origins differently. Native English speakers’ faster responses to English idioms than controls supported a dual route model; however, both native English and bilingual speakers’ faster responses to Chinese idioms than controls called for a less straightforward interpretation.

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“…Another relevant variable is final word predictability [5,16,17], which refers to the likelihood of providing a correct idiomatic completion in a fill-in-the-blank (cloze) task (e.g., estirar la ____ / Kick the ____). For example, the idiom "verse de higos a brevas" (e.g., to meet very rarely; literally: to meet from figs to figs) is fairly predictable in Spanish, given that an alternate completion is highly unlikely (e.g., verse de higos a manzanas; literally: to meet from figs to apples), and even semantically anomalous.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies have shown that sentences are comprehended faster and more accurately if they contain idioms that are familiar to the speakers rather than unfamiliar [5,9,19,20]. A related variable is the knowledge of the figurative meaning [6,8] or meaningfulness [5,6,16,21]. It refers to how well an individual knows the meaning of an idiomatic expression and it has been shown to be related with online reading idiom comprehension times [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions

et al. 2021

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This study provides psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions. A total of 965 Spanish native speakers rated the idioms in 7 subjective variables: familiarity, knowledge of the expression, decomposability, literality, predictability, valence and arousal. Correlational analyses showed that familiarity has a strong positive correlation with knowledge, suggesting that the knowledge of the figurative meaning of an idiom is highly related to its frequency of use. Familiarity has a moderate positive correlation with final word predictability, indicating that the more familiar an idiom is rated, the more predictable it tends to be. Decomposability shows a moderate positive correlation with literality, suggesting that those idioms whose figurative meaning is easier to deduce from their constituents tend to have a plausible literal meaning. In affective terms, Spanish idioms tend to convey more negative (66%) than positive meanings (33%). Furthermore, valence and arousal show a quadratic relationship, in line with the typical U-shaped relationship found for single words, which means that the more emotionally valenced an idiom is rated, the more arousing it is considered to be. This database will provide researchers with a large pool of stimuli for studying the representation and processing of idioms in healthy and clinical populations.

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“Going to town”: Large-scale norming and statistical analysis of 870 American English idioms

Cited by 21 publications

References 29 publications

The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan

The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan

An Investigation of Idiom Processing Advantage using Translated Familiar Idioms

Psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions

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