Why are idioms recognized fast?
It is an established fact that idiomatic expressions are fast to process. However, the explanation of the phenomenon is controversial. Using a semantic judgment paradigm, where people decide whether a string is meaningful or not, the present experiment tested the predictions deriving from the three main theories of idiom recognition-the lexical representation hypothesis, the idiom decomposition hypothesis, and the configuration hypothesis. Participants were faster at judging decomposable idioms, nondecomposable idioms, and clichés than at judging their matched controls. The effect was comparable for all conventional expressions. The results were interpreted as suggesting that, as posited by the configuration hypothesis, the fact that they are known expressions, rather than idiomaticity, explains their fast recognition.
Tabossi
Patrizia
P
Dipartimento de Psicologia, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy. tabossi@units.it
Fanari
Rachele
R
Wolf
Kinou
K
D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics