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The Idiom Processing Advantage is Explained By Surprisal.

Michaela Socolof1, Timothy J O'Donnell2, Michael Wagner2

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cognitive Science
|July 20, 2025
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Idioms are processed faster than literal phrases due to lower surprisal, not just compositionality. This idiom processing advantage, particularly for nouns in verb-object idioms, is explained by expectation-based surprisal theory.

Keywords:
CompositionalityIdiomsLanguage comprehensionLanguage productionProcessingSurprisal

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Idioms are processed faster than literal phrases, sparking debate on chunking vs. compositionality.
  • Existing research offers conflicting conclusions regarding the impact of compositionality on idiom processing.
  • Surprisal theory, an expectation-based model of sentence processing, offers a potential unifying framework.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate idiom processing through the lens of information update and surprisal theory.
  • To determine if surprisal can explain the idiom processing advantage.
  • To examine the role of compositionality versus predictability in idiom comprehension and production.

Main Methods:

  • Comprehension experiments on verb-object idioms.
  • Production experiments on verb-object idioms.
  • Analysis of idiom processing using surprisal metrics and comparison with matched literal phrases.

Main Results:

  • The idiom processing advantage is largely explained by lower surprisal values for idioms compared to literal phrases.
  • Idioms exhibit lower surprisal, indicating greater predictability within an expectation-based framework.
  • The idiom advantage is most prominent on the noun component of verb-object idioms.

Conclusions:

  • Surprisal theory provides a more general framework for understanding idiom processing advantages than compositionality alone.
  • The predictability of idioms, quantified by surprisal, is a key factor in their rapid processing.
  • Future research should consider information-theoretic approaches to further elucidate language processing mechanisms.