The wrong horse was bet on – The Effects of Argument Structure versus Argument Adjacency on the Processing of Idiomatic Sentences
Psycholinguistc research remains puzzled by the question under what circurmstances syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. In this study we examined the effects of verb argument structure and argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German. In two sentence-completion experiments, participants listened to idiomatic and literal sentences, both in active and passive voice, without the sentence-final verb. They indicated via button-press, which of three visually presented verbs best completed the sentence.In both experiments, idiomatic sentences were processed faster than literal ones, and active sentences faster than passive ones. In passivized sentences, the patterns of argument structure and argument adjacency reversed across experiments: In Experiment 1, sentences with ditransitive verbs were processed faster than sentences with transitive verbs, and vice versa in Experiment 2. This pattern corresponds to faster processing of adjacent than of nonadjacent arguments and thus points to the dominating role of argument adjacency rather than argumentstructure in the processing of passivized sentences. With respect to idiom processing, we conclude that the adjacency of the verb and its arguments determines whether passivized idioms keep their figurative meaning.