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On catching on to idiomatic expressions
1Department of Psychology, University of Washington, 98195, Seattle, Washington.
Memory & Cognition
|November 12, 2013
Summary
This study explored how people understand sentences with both literal and idiomatic meanings. Findings suggest distinct cognitive strategies exist for processing literal versus idiomatic language.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Language Processing
Background:
- Understanding ambiguous sentences requires distinguishing between literal and idiomatic interpretations.
- Previous research has not definitively established separate processing modes for idiomatic and literal language.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test the hypothesis that distinct idiomatic and literal sentence processing modes exist.
- To investigate the effect of induced processing sets on the interpretation of ambiguous sentences.
Main Methods:
- 414 undergraduates were presented with sentences containing literal or idiomatic ambiguities.
- Participants indicated whether they perceived the literal or idiomatic meaning of a subsequent test sentence first.
- Experimental conditions involved inducing a set to perceive either literal or idiomatic meanings, or no specific set.
Main Results:
- Inducing a set to process idioms increased the likelihood of perceiving the idiomatic meaning first.
- Inducing a set to process literal meanings decreased the likelihood of perceiving the idiomatic meaning first.
- These effects were observed without providing specific grammatical or semantic cues for the test sentences.
Conclusions:
- The results support the existence of distinct cognitive strategies for processing literal and idiomatic expressions.
- Sentence comprehension may involve specialized, context-dependent processing pathways for different types of meaning.
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