STEERING CLEAR: AVOIDANCE IN THE PRODUCTION OF IDIOMS

In order to test the assumption that even very advanced speakers of a second language tend to avoid producing idioms, fluent bilinguals who were native speakers of Spanish and had learned English as adults were asked to translate passages containing idioms into everyday conversational English. It was hypothesized that 1) subjects would use their knowledge of English to produce many idioms; 2) more idioms that were identical in both languages would be produced; 3) subjects would use more idioms that are frequently heard and semantically transparent. Results support the first two hypotheses but not the third.