Literal salience in on-line processing of idiomatic expressions by second language learners

By A. Cieślicka. 2006

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article addresses the question of how second language (L2) learners understand idiomatic expressions in their second/foreign language and advances the proposition that literal meanings of idiom constituents enjoy processing priority over their figurative interpretations. This suggestion forms the core of the literal-salience resonant model of L2 idiom comprehension, whose major assumptions are outlined in the article. On the literal salience view, understanding L2 idioms entails an obligatory computation of the literal meanings of idiom constituent words, even if these idioms are embedded in a figurative context and if their idiomatic interpretation is well-known to L2 learners. The literal salience assumption was put to the test in a cross-modal lexical priming experiment with advanced Polish learners of English. The experiment showed more priming for visual targets related to literal meanings of idiom constituent words than for targets related figuratively to the metaphoric interpretation of the idiomatic phrase. This effect held true irrespective of whether the stimulus sentence contained a literal or a non-literal idiom.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b159e3268322f247d4948df66c2f352a0ced6624

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review (2010, background): “A similar L2 disadvantage can be seen with the processing of idioms (Vanlancker-Sidtis, 2003; Cieslicka, 2006), and with prosodic processing, at the word level (Tremblay, 2008), at the phrasal level (Harley, Howard & Hart, 1995), and at the semantic level (Akker and Cutler, 2003).”
Does pictorial elucidation foster recollection of idioms? (2009, background): “One may wonder, though, whether learners might not spontaneously make use of the literal meaning of the words that make up second language (L2) idioms to help them interpret their figurative use, and a study by Cieslicka (2006) actually suggests that they do.”
The idiom principle revisited (2014, methodology): “Cieslicka (2006) observed faster response times to the words associated with the literal meaning than to those associated with the figurative meaning.”