Scratching your tête over language-switched idioms: Evidence from eye-movement measures of reading.

Idioms are semantically non-compositional multiword units whose meanings often go beyond literal interpretations of their component words (e.g., break the ice, kick the bucket, spill the beans). According to hybrid models of idiom processing, idioms are subject to both direct retrieval from the lexicon in early stages of processing, and word-by-word compositional reanalysis in later stages of comprehension. However, a less clear aspect is how disrupting an idiom's canonical form, and thus its direct retrieval, impacts the time course of comprehension. In this eye-tracking reading study, healthy English-French bilingual adults with English as their dominant language read sentences containing English idioms in their canonical form (e.g., break the ice), or in a switched form where the phrase-final noun was translated into French (e.g., break the glace). Thus, within this manipulation, momentary language switches modified the canonical form of idioms, while at the same time minimally altering the semantics of their component words, thus nudging readers towards a compositional processing route. Analyses of eye-movement data revealed switching costs in longer reading times at early (but not late) processing stages for idioms compared to matched literal phrases. Interestingly, the cost of language switching was attenuated by the availability of a translationally equivalent idiom in the non-target language (French, e.g., briser la glace). Taken together, these results suggest that direct retrieval is the preferential route in the comprehension of idioms' canonical forms, which acts as an effective repair strategy by the language-processing system when recovering the underlying form of modified idioms.

Determining the importance of frequency and contextual diversity in the lexical organization of multiword expressions.

Corpus-based models of lexical strength have called into question the role of word frequency as an organizing principle of the lexicon, revealing that contextual and semantic diversity measures provide a closer fit to lexical behavior data (Adelman et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2012). Contextual diversity measures modify word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, while semantic diversity measures consider the semantic consistency of contextual word occurrence. Recent research has shown that a better account of lexical organization data is provided by socially based measures of semantic diversity, which encode the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Johns, 2021b). While most research on contextual diversity has focused on single words, recent corpus-based and experimental evidence suggests that an integral part of language use involves recurrent and more structurally complex units, such as multiword phrases and idioms. The aim of the present work was to determine if contextual and semantic diversity drive lexical organization at the level of multiword units (here, operationalized as idiomatic expressions), in addition to single words. To this end, we analyzed normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) using a set of contextual, semantic, and socially based diversity measures that were computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. The results confirm the superiority of diversity measures over frequency for multiword expressions, suggesting that multiword units, such as idiomatic phrases, show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).