Descriptive Norms for 171 Idiomatic Expressions: Familiarity, Compositionality, Predictability, and Literality

Descriptive norms for 171 idiomatic expressions rated by 226 subjects on the dimensions of familiarity, compositionality, predictability, and literality are reported. Different theoretical positions concerning the comprehension of idioms are discussed, and the relevance of each dimension to idiom processing is described. The dimension of predictability correlated significantly with alternative ratings of familiarity. Literality negatively correlated with abnormal decomposability. Inconsistencies between the compositionality ratings obtained in the present study and prior studies (e.g., Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989) are noted.

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