Chinese idioms as constructions

Chinese Quadrisyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (henceforth QIEs) are highly productive in the modern language. They can be used to understand the cognitive processing of structure and meaning during reading comprehension, as in the patterning of [qian-A-wan-B] ‘1k-A-10k-B’ (e.g. one-thousand army ten-thousand horse). However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of QIEs during reading comprehension. Adopting the framework of Construction Grammar, in the present study, we aimed to study the convergence and divergence between native speakers and L2 learners in the processing of Chinese idiomatic constructions. In the present study, twenty-three native university-level Mandarin speakers and twenty-three L2 learners of intermediate and advanced levels of Mandarin, all speakers of the non Sinosphere, participated in the experiment, and were instructed to make a semantic congruency judgment during the presentation of a QIE. Our results showed that, for both native speakers and L2 learners, semantically transparent idiomatic constructions elicited much shorter RTs than semantically opaque idiomatic constructions. Our behavioral results also showed that native speakers processed low frequency QIEs faster than high frequency ones, implying semantic satiation to impede the interpretation of high frequency idioms. For L2 learners, it was semantic transparency, rather than frequency, that played a more prominent role in idiom processing.

EXPRESS: Individual Word Activation and Word Frequency Effects during the Processing of Opaque Idiomatic Expressions

Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activation of individual words during the processing of opaque idioms. In two primed word naming experiments, Dutch native speakers silently read sentences word by word and then named the last word of the sentence. This target word was embedded in either an idiomatic or a literal context, and was either expected/correct in this context (COR), or semantically related (REL) or unrelated (UNREL) to the expected word. The correct target word in the idiomatic context was always part of an opaque idiom. Faster naming latencies for the idiom-final noun than for the unrelated target in the idiomatic context indicated that the idiom was activated as a whole during processing. In addition, semantic facilitation was observed in the literal context (COR<REL<UNREL), but not in the idiomatic context (COR<REL=UNREL). This is evidence that the idiom-final noun was not activated at the meaning level of representation. However, an inhibitory effect of orthographic word frequency of the idiom-final noun indicated that the idiom-final noun was activated at the form level. These results provide evidence in favor of a hybrid model of idiom processing in which the individual words and the idiom as a whole interact on form and meaning levels of representation.

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.