Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye-tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers

By A. Siyanova‐Chanturia, Kathy Conklin, N. Schmitt. 2011

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively (at the end of the day — ‘eventually’), literally (at the end of the day — ‘in the evening’), and novel phrases (at the end of the war). Native speaker results indicate a processing advantage for idioms over novel phrases, as evidenced by fewer and shorter fixations. Further, no processing advantage is found for figurative idiom uses over literal ones in a full idiom analysis or in a recognition point analysis. Contrary to native speaker results, non-native findings suggest that L2 speakers process idioms at a similar speed to novel phrases. Further, figurative uses are processed more slowly than literal ones. Importantly, the recognition point analysis allows us to establish where non-natives slow down when processing the figurative meaning.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fc35e39bcd4da635ca2fc354d91989005815595

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In Artificial Intelligence

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Citations in the corpus

The idiom principle revisited (2014, background): “In Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011a), the longest idioms were also the least frequent as attested in the British National Corpus (BNC) (e.g., you can’t judge a book by its cover, see which way the wind is blowing, leave a bad taste in your mouth, etc.).”
Neural Lattice Language Models (2018, background): “Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011) show that native speakers of a language have signiﬁcantly reduced response time when processing idiomatic phrases, whether they are used in an idiomatic sense or not, while Bannard and Matthews (2008) show that children learning a language are better at speaking…”
A Phrasal Expressions List (2012, background): “Formulaic sequences are consistently read more quickly than non-formulaic equivalents by L1 readers (and sometimes by L2 readers), as shown by eye-movement studies (Siyanova-Chanturia et al. 2011; Underwood et al. 2004) and self-paced reading tasks (Conklin and Schmitt 2008).”