Are figurative interpretations of idioms directly retrieved, compositionally built, or both? Evidence from eye...

Idioms are part of a general class of multiword expressions where the overall interpretation cannot be fully determined through a simple syntactic and semantic (i.e., compositional) analysis of their component words (e.g., kick the bucket, save your skin). Idioms are thus simultaneously amenable to direct retrieval from memory, and to an on-demand compositional analysis, yet it is unclear which processes lead to figurative interpretations of idioms during comprehension. In this eye-tracking study, healthy adults read sentences in their native language that contained idioms, which were followed by figurative- or literal-biased disambiguating sentential information. The results showed that the earliest stages of comprehension are driven by direct retrieval of idiomatic forms; however, later stages of comprehension, after which point the intended meaning of an idiom is known, are driven by both direct retrieval and compositional processing. Of note, at later stages, increased idiom decomposability slowed reading time, suggesting more effortful figurative comprehension. Together, these results are most consistent with multidetermined or hybrid models of idiom processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).