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Article published In:
Words & Constructions: Language complexity in linguistics and psychology
Edited by Juhani Järvikivi, Pirita Pyykkönen-Klauck and Matti Laine
[The Mental Lexicon 9:2] 2014
► pp. 267–293

Processing multiword idiomatic strings

Many words in one?

| University of Modena
Idioms are strings of words whose figurative meaning does not necessarily derive from that of the constituent parts. They belong to the vast and heterogeneous realm of multiword expressions, i.e. literal and non-literal word clusters whose representations are stored in semantic memory. This article provides an updated review of the psycholinguistic and electrophysiological literature on the processes underlying idiom comprehension with specific reference to the cues that lead to idiom recognition, to the syntactic and semantic behavior of idioms, to the relationships between literal compositionality and idiomatic meaning retrieval. Behavioral models of idiom comprehension are presented and discussed also with respect to the electrophysiological correlates of idiom and figurative language comprehension.
Keywords: comprehension, syntax, production, meaning compositionality, figurative meaning, semantic transparency, predictability, semantic representation, event-related brain potentials, idiom
Published online: 21 November 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.9.2.05cac
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2017. Can you tell it by the prime? A study of metaphorical priming in high‐functioning autism in comparison with matched controls. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 52:6 ► pp. 766 ff. DOI logo
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2017. Determining the Compositionality of Noun-Adjective Pairs with Lexical Variants and Distributional Semantics. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics 3:1 ► pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
Beck, Sara D. & Andrea Weber
2016. Bilingual and Monolingual Idiom Processing Is Cut from the Same Cloth: The Role of the L1 in Literal and Figurative Meaning Activation. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo
Citron, Francesca M. M., Cristina Cacciari, Michael Kucharski, Luna Beck, Markus Conrad & Arthur M. Jacobs
2016. When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG). Behavior Research Methods 48:1 ► pp. 91 ff. DOI logo
Jacobs, Arthur, Markus J. Hofmann & Annette Kinder
2016. On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo
Kong, Lingyue, John X. Zhang & Yongwei Zhang
2016. Are Chinese Correlative Conjunctions Psychologically Real? An Investigation of the Combination Frequency Effect. Psychological Reports 119:1 ► pp. 106 ff. DOI logo
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2016. Hemispheric involvement in the processing of Chinese idioms: An fMRI study. Neuropsychologia 87 ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo
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2015. Literal analysis and idiom retrieval in ambiguous idioms processing: A reading-time study. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 27:7 ► pp. 797 ff. DOI logo
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[no author supplied]
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