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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 55–71

Interpreting idioms in a second language

The role of context and transfer in interpreting English idioms by native Dutch speakers

| University of Groningen
| University of Groningen
| University of Groningen

How do people understand figurative speech in a foreign language? What strategies do they use? By means of an online questionnaire, this study investigated to what extent contextual information and transfer play a role in the interpretation of idioms in a second language, controlling for familiarity. Sixty-one native speakers of Dutch were asked to guess the correct interpretation of English idioms with and without a Dutch equivalent, presented with and without context, out of four answer options. The results showed that correctly interpreting an idiom depends on both the presence of context and the possibility of transfer. More correct interpretations were given when an idiom was presented in a context, but only for English idioms without an equivalent in the native language. English idioms with an equivalent in Dutch, often rated as familiar, were mostly understood correctly. We interpret this result as the involvement of transfer from the native language.

Keywords: idiom comprehension, second language, contextual information, transfer, familiarity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Analysis and results
    • 3.1Exclusion of idioms
    • 3.2The effect of context and transfer
    • 3.3Incorrect interpretations of English idioms without L1-equivalent
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Data availability
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00061.dij
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