Less Direct, More Analytical

Eye-Movement Measures of L2 Idiom Reading

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5900366
AutoresMarco S G Senaldi (0000-0003-2205-3843, McGill University, autor de correspondencia), Debra Titone (0000-0001-9060-9896, McGill University, autor de correspondencia), Debra A Titone
Año2022
Volumen7
Número2
Páginas91
Fecha de publicación2022-04-06
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages7020091
OpenAlexW4224217491
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas116

Idioms (e.g., break the ice, spill the beans) are ubiquitous multiword units that are often semantically non-compositional. Psycholinguistic data suggests that L1 readers process idioms in a hybrid fashion, with early comprehension facilitated by direct retrieval, and later comprehension inhibited by factors promoting compositional parsing (e.g., semantic decomposability). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the role of direct retrieval and compositional analysis when idioms are read naturally in sentences in an L2. Thus, French-English bilingual adults with French as their L1 were tested using English sentences. For idioms in canonical form, Experiment 1 showed that prospective verb-related decomposability and retrospective noun-related decomposability guided L2 readers towards bottom-up figurative meaning access over different time courses. Direct retrieval played a lesser role, and was mediated by the availability of a congruent "cognate" idiom in the readers' L1. Next, Experiment 2 included idioms where direct retrieval was disrupted by a phrase-final language switch into French (e.g., break the glace, spill the fèves). Switched idioms were read comparably to switched literal phrases at early stages, but were penalized at later stages. These results collectively suggest that L2 idiom processing is mostly compositional, with direct retrieval playing a lesser role in figurative meaning comprehension

Comprehension · Eye tracking · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Meaning (existential · Natural language processing · Parsing · Phrase · Reading (process · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Artificial Intelligence