Against the Lexical Representation of Idioms

In three experiments subjects made speeded acceptability judgements about idiomatic, literal and nonsense phrases. In the first experiment subjects responded faster to idioms and everyday phrases than their respective controls. In addition they made faster responses to idioms with high rather than low metaphoric transparency. In Experiment 2 there was no effect of metaphoric transparency in idioms used by Mueller and Gibbs (1987). Subjects in the same experiment were equally fast classifying idioms beginning with high and low frequency words, and their response latencies were affected more by changes in the length of control phrases than of idioms. In Experiment 3 the interpolation of nonsense words in phrases to force word by word processing did not abolish the processing time advantage for idioms over control phrases. None of the present results is clearly consistent with the notion that an idiom's meaning is stored with the lexical entry for its initial word.

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