Cognitive processes as evidence of the idiom principle
Britt Erman | Stockholm University
The study seeks to establish whether pause frequency and pause duration could inform us about the size of linguistic units stored in the mental lexicon. Pauses are seen as a reflection of cognitive effort in lexical retrieval. The basic assumption is that a particular concept starts activating related concepts in a conceptual network via spreading activation. Pausing is assumed to be rare when spreading activation is at work, i.e. in the recall of multiword, or prefabricated, structures. The results show that pausing was significantly more frequent in connection with lexical search in computed as compared to prefabricated structures, thus indicating that prefabricated structures are stored and retrieved as wholes. The most important implication of the study is that the results give further support to John Sinclair’s proposed ‘idiom principle’, according to which strings that would appear to be analyzable into segments nevertheless constitute single choices.
Keywords: formulaic language, hesitation, lexical search, retrieval times, spreading activation, cognitive processes, mental lexicon, idiomaticity, prefabricated language, prefabs, idiom principle
Published online: 06 April 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.1.04erm
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.1.04erm
Cited by
Cited by other publications
No author info given
No author info given
Aston, Guy
Astruc, Lluïsa & Lina Adinolfi
Bartning, Inge, Fanny Forsberg Lundell & Victorine Hancock
Buerki, Andreas
EunJooLee
Hallin, Anna Eva & Diana Van Lancker Sidtis
Haselow, Alexander
Nekrasova, Tatiana M.
Rammell, C. Sophia, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis & David B. Pisoni
Strik, Helmer, Micha Hulsbosch & Catia Cucchiarini
Thonus, Terese & Beth L. Hewett
Wood, David
Xiang, Xia, Binghan Zheng & Dezheng Feng
Yang, Seung-yun, Ji Sook Ahn & Diana Van Lancker Sidtis
서지영
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.