Are figurative interpretations of idioms directly retrieved, compositionally built, or both? Evidence from eye movement measures of reading.

Idioms are part of a general class of multiword expressions where the overall interpretation cannot be fully determined through a simple syntactic and semantic (i.e., compositional) analysis of their component words (e.g., kick the bucket, save your skin). Idioms are thus simultaneously amenable to direct retrieval from memory, and to an on-demand compositional analysis, yet it is unclear which processes lead to figurative interpretations of idioms during comprehension. In this eye-tracking study, healthy adults read sentences in their native language that contained idioms, which were followed by figurative- or literal-biased disambiguating sentential information. The results showed that the earliest stages of comprehension are driven by direct retrieval of idiomatic forms; however, later stages of comprehension, after which point the intended meaning of an idiom is known, are driven by both direct retrieval and compositional processing. Of note, at later stages, increased idiom decomposability slowed reading time, suggesting more effortful figurative comprehension. Together, these results are most consistent with multidetermined or hybrid models of idiom processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Examining lateralized semantic access using pictures.

A divided visual field (DVF) experiment examined the semantic processing strategies employed by the cerebral hemispheres to determine if strategies observed with written word stimuli generalize to other media for communicating semantic information. We employed picture stimuli and vary the degree of semantic relatedness between the picture pairs. Participants made an on-line semantic relatedness judgment in response to sequentially presented pictures. We found that when pictures are presented to the right hemisphere responses are generally more accurate than the left hemisphere for semantic relatedness judgments for picture pairs. Furthermore, consistent with earlier DVF studies employing words, we conclude that the RH is better at accessing or maintaining access to information that has a weak or more remote semantic relationship. We also found evidence of faster access for pictures presented to the LH in the strongly-related condition. Overall, these results are consistent with earlier DVF word studies that argue that the cerebral hemispheres each play an important and separable role during semantic retrieval.