Norms and comprehension times for 305 French idiomatic expressions

The dynamics of multiword sequence extraction

Being able to process multiword sequences is central for both language comprehension and production. Numerous studies support this claim, but less is known about the way multiword sequences are acquired, and more specifically how associations between their constituents are established over time. Here we adapted the Hebb naming task into a Hebb lexical decision task to study the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction. Participants had to read letter strings presented on a computer screen and were required to classify them as words or pseudowords. Unknown to the participants, a triplet of words or pseudowords systematically appeared in the same order and random words or pseudowords were inserted between two repetitions of the triplet. We found that response times (RTs) for the unpredictable first position in the triplet decreased over repetitions (i.e., indicating the presence of a repetition effect) but more slowly and with a different dynamic compared with items appearing at the predictable second and third positions in the repeated triplet (i.e., showing a slightly different predictability effect). Implicit and explicit learning also varied as a function of the nature of the triplet (i.e., unrelated words, pseudowords, semantically related words, or idioms). Overall, these results provide new empirical evidence about the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction, and more generally about the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.

The Elephant in the Room: A Systematic Review of Stimulus Control in Neuro-Measurement Studies on Figurative Language Processing

The processing of metaphors and idioms has been the subject of neuroscientific research for several decades. However, results are often contradictory, which can be traced back to inconsistent terminology and stimulus control. In this systematic review of research methods, we analyse linguistic aspects of 116 research papers which used EEG, fMRI, PET, MEG, or NIRS to investigate the neural processing of the two figurative subtypes metaphor and idiom. We critically examine the theoretical foundations as well as stimulus control by performing a systematic literature synthesis according to the PRISMA guidelines. We explicitly do not analyse the findings of the studies but instead focus on four primary aspects: definitions of figurative language and its subtypes, linguistic theory behind the studies, control for factors influencing figurative language processing, and the relationship between theoretical and operational definitions. We found both a lack and a broad variety in existing definitions and operationalisation, especially in regard to familiarity and conventionality. We identify severe obstacles in the comparability and validation potential of the results of the papers in our review corpus. We propose the development of a consensus in fundamental terminology and more transparency in the reporting of stimulus design in the research on figurative language processing.

Psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions

This study provides psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions. A total of 965 Spanish native speakers rated the idioms in 7 subjective variables: familiarity, knowledge of the expression, decomposability, literality, predictability, valence and arousal. Correlational analyses showed that familiarity has a strong positive correlation with knowledge, suggesting that the knowledge of the figurative meaning of an idiom is highly related to its frequency of use. Familiarity has a moderate positive correlation with final word predictability, indicating that the more familiar an idiom is rated, the more predictable it tends to be. Decomposability shows a moderate positive correlation with literality, suggesting that those idioms whose figurative meaning is easier to deduce from their constituents tend to have a plausible literal meaning. In affective terms, Spanish idioms tend to convey more negative (66%) than positive meanings (33%). Furthermore, valence and arousal show a quadratic relationship, in line with the typical U-shaped relationship found for single words, which means that the more emotionally valenced an idiom is rated, the more arousing it is considered to be. This database will provide researchers with a large pool of stimuli for studying the representation and processing of idioms in healthy and clinical populations.

IMABASE: A new set of 313 colourised line drawings standardised in French for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age-of-acquisition, and imageability

We provide normative data for a new set of 313 colourised line drawings. The drawings were standardised on name agreement (N = 60 participants), image agreement (N = 34), conceptual familiarity (N = 36), age of acquisition (N = 35), and imageability (N = 35). Objective visual complexity measures are given for the pictures, and objective word frequencies are provided for the modal names of the drawings. Reliability measures for the collected norms are very high. There are high levels of agreement between the names given by the participants and the drawings and comparative analyses indicate that the distribution of name agreement scores is very similar in both our own database and the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al., 2018). A novel "picture-choice task" used to assess name-image agreement (N = 30) reveals that the great majority of the IMABASE pictures that are also present in MultiPic are rated as providing better pictorial representations of the corresponding concepts. Finally, most of the correlations are comparable with those reported in other normative studies on colourised drawings. The whole set of pictures is freely available from https://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/~lead/imabase/ and the norms are available as Supplementary Material.

Comprehension and Inference: Relationships Between Oral and Written Modalities in Good and Poor Comprehenders During Adolescence

Purpose We investigated the relationships between text reading comprehension and oral idiom comprehension in adolescents. We also examined the more specific relationships between inference in text comprehension and inference in idiom comprehension. Method We selected participants from an initial sample of 140 students aged 13-15 years to form 2 groups, according to their decoding and reading comprehension abilities: 1 group of good comprehenders/good decoders (n = 49) and 1 group of less skilled comprehenders but with adequate decoding skills (n = 20). The reading comprehension task comprised both literal and inferential (text-based and knowledge-based) questions. These 2 groups were then compared on an idiom comprehension task. In this task, idioms were presented orally, and students were placed in a situation that simulated a real-life oral interaction. The idioms were novel for the students (translated from a foreign language), either transparent or opaque, and presented either with a supportive context or without any context. Results Good reading comprehenders outperformed less skilled ones on the idiom task. Both groups benefited from the supportive context, especially the good comprehenders. Knowledge-based inferences in written text comprehension were related to contextual inferences for opaque idioms, while semantic inferences for transparent idioms were related to literal text comprehension, but not to text-connecting inferences. Conclusion These results are discussed both theoretically, in terms of cross-modal comprehension processes, and practically, in terms of implications for remediation.

Idiomatic expressions evoke stronger emotional responses in the brain than literal sentences

Recent neuroscientific research shows that metaphors engage readers at the emotional level more strongly than literal expressions. What still remains unclear is what makes metaphors more engaging, and whether this generalises to all figurative expressions, no matter how conventionalised they are. This fMRI study aimed to investigate whether idiomatic expressions - the least creative part of figurative language - indeed trigger a higher affective resonance than literal expressions, and to explore possible interactions between activation in emotion-relevant neural structures and regions associated with figurative language processing. Participants silently read for comprehension a set of emotionally positive, negative and neutral idioms embedded in short sentences, and similarly valenced literal sentences. As in studies on metaphors, we found enhanced activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus and left amygdala in response to idioms, indexing stronger recruitment of executive control functions and enhanced emotional engagement, respectively. This suggests that the comprehension of even highly conventionalised and familiar figurative expressions, namely idioms, recruits regions involved in emotional processing. Furthermore, increased activation of the IFG interacted positively with activation in the amygdala, suggesting that the stronger cognitive engagement driven by idioms may in turn be coupled with stronger involvement at the emotional level.

Normative Data of Dutch Idiomatic Expressions: Subjective Judgments You Can Bank on

The processing of idiomatic expressions is a topical issue in empirical research. Various factors have been found to influence idiom processing, such as idiom familiarity and idiom transparency. Information on these variables is usually obtained through norming studies. Studies investigating the effect of various properties on idiom processing have led to ambiguous results. This may be due to the variability of operationalizations of the idiom properties across norming studies, which in turn may affect the reliability of the subjective judgements. However, not all studies that collected normative data on idiomatic expressions investigated their reliability, and studies that did address the reliability of subjective ratings used various measures and produced mixed results. In this study, we investigated the reliability of subjective judgements, the relation between subjective and objective idiom frequency, and the impact of these dimensions on the participants' idiom knowledge by collecting normative data of five subjective idiom properties (Frequency of Exposure, Meaning Familiarity, Frequency of Usage, Transparency, and Imageability) from 390 native speakers and objective corpus frequency for 374 Dutch idiomatic expressions. For reliability, we compared measures calculated in previous studies, with the D-coefficient, a metric taken from Generalizability Theory. High reliability was found for all subjective dimensions. One reliability metric, Krippendorff's alpha, generally produced lower values, while similar values were obtained for three other measures (Cronbach's alpha, Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, and the D-coefficient). Advantages of the D-coefficient are that it can be applied to unbalanced research designs, and to estimate the minimum number of raters required to obtain reliable ratings. Slightly higher coefficients were observed for so-called experience-based dimensions (Frequency of Exposure, Meaning Familiarity, and Frequency of Usage) than for content-based dimensions (Transparency and Imageability). In addition, fewer raters were required to obtain reliable ratings for the experience-based dimensions. Subjective and objective frequency appeared to be poorly correlated, while all subjective idiom properties and objective frequency turned out to affect idiom knowledge. Meaning Familiarity, Subjective and Objective Frequency of Exposure, Frequency of Usage, and Transparency positively contributed to idiom knowledge, while a negative effect was found for Imageability. We discuss these relationships in more detail, and give methodological recommendations with respect to the procedures and the measure to calculate reliability.

Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Idiom comprehension in aphasia: Literal interference and abstract representation

We investigate three potential mechanisms underlying the deficit in idiom comprehension seen in aphasia: difficulty inhibiting literal meanings, inability to recognize that a figurative interpretation is required, and difficulty processing abstract words and concepts. Unimpaired adults and PWA read high and moderate familiarity idioms either preceded or followed by a figuratively biasing context sentence. They then completed a string-to-word probe selection task, choosing between a figurative target, a literal lure, and unrelated concrete and abstract lures. PWA chose the figurative target more often for more familiar idioms and after figuratively biasing contexts, suggesting that difficulty accessing figurative meanings may be a key contributor to idiom impairment in aphasia. Importantly, PWA chose abstract lures at the same rate as they chose literal lures, suggesting that abstract lures may be considered equally good matches for weak idiomatic representations in PWA, and therefore that idiomatic figurative meanings may be represented similarly to abstract concepts for PWA. These results have implications for models of idiom comprehension in aphasia, as well as the design of future studies of idiom comprehension in PWA.

Cognitive and Personality Components Underlying Spoken Idiom Comprehension in Context. An Exploratory Study

In this exploratory study, we investigated whether and to what extent individual differences in cognitive and personality variables are associated with spoken idiom comprehension in context. Language unimpaired participants were enrolled in a cross-modal lexical decision study in which semantically ambiguous Italian idioms (i.e., strings with both a literal and an idiomatic interpretation as, for instance, break the ice), predictable or unpredictable before the string offset, were embedded in idiom-biasing contexts. To explore the contributions of different cognitive and personality components, participants also completed a series of tests respectively assessing general speed, inhibitory control, short-term and working memory, cognitive flexibility, crystallized and fluid intelligence, and personality. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that online idiom comprehension was associated with the participants' working memory, inhibitory control and crystallized verbal intelligence, an association modulated by idiom type. Also personality-related variables (State Anxiety and Openness to Experience) were associated with idiom comprehension, although in marginally significant ways. These results contribute to the renewed interest on how individual variability modulates language comprehension, and for the first time document contributions of individual variability on lexicalized, high frequency multi-word expressions as idioms adding new knowledge to the existing evidence on metaphor and sarcasm.

Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French

We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA) and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics and correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as Supplemental Material .

"Going to town": Large-scale norming and statistical analysis of 870 American English idioms

An idiom is classically defined as a formulaic sequence whose meaning is comprised of more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, idioms pose a unique problem for models of sentence processing, as researchers must take into account how idioms vary and along what dimensions, as these factors can modulate the ease with which an idiomatic interpretation can be activated. In order to help ensure external validity and comparability across studies, idiom research benefits from the availability of publicly available resources reporting ratings from a large number of native speakers. Resources such as the one outlined in the current paper facilitate opportunities for consensus across studies on idiom processing and help to further our goals as a research community. To this end, descriptive norms were obtained for 870 American English idioms from 2,100 participants along five dimensions: familiarity, meaningfulness, literal plausibility, global decomposability, and predictability. Idiom familiarity and meaningfulness strongly correlated with one another, whereas familiarity and meaningfulness were positively correlated with both global decomposability and predictability. Correlations with previous norming studies are also discussed.

Normative data for idiomatic expressions

Idiomatic expressions such as kick the bucket or go down a storm can differ on a number of internal features, such as familiarity, meaning, literality, and decomposability, and these types of features have been the focus of a number of normative studies. In this article, we provide normative data for a set of Bulgarian idioms and their English translations, and by doing so replicate in a Slavic language the relationships between the ratings previously found in Romance and Germanic languages. Additionally, we compared whether collecting these types of ratings in between-subjects or within-subjects designs affects the data and the conclusions drawn, and found no evidence that design type affects the final outcome. Finally, we present the results of a meta-analysis that summarizes the relationships found across the literature. As in many previous individual studies, we found that familiarity correlates with a number of other features; however, such studies have shown conflicting results concerning literality and decomposability ratings. The meta-analysis revealed reliable relationships of decomposability with a number of other measures, such as familiarity, meaning, and predictability. Conversely, literality was shown to have little to no relationship with any of the other subjective ratings. The implications for these relationships in the context of the wider experimental literature are discussed, with a particular focus on the importance of attaining familiarity ratings for each sample of participants in experimental work.

Descriptive norms for 350 Chinese idioms with seven syntactic structures

The most important forms of idioms in Chinese, chengyus (CYs), have a fixed length of four Chinese characters. Most CYs are joined structures of two, two-character words-subject-verb units (SVs), verb-object units (VOs), structures of modification (SMs), or verb-verb units-or of four, one-character words. Both the first and second pairs of words in a four-word CY form an SV, a VO, or an SM. In the present study, normative measures were obtained for knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition, predictability, literality, and compositionality for 350 CYs, and the influences of the CYs' syntactic structures on the descriptive norms were analyzed. Consistent with previous studies, all of the norms yielded a high reliability, and there were strong correlations between knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, and age of acquisition, and between familiarity and predictability. Unlike in previous studies (e.g., Libben & Titone in Memory & Cognition, 36, 1103-1121, 2008), however, we observed a strong correlation between literality and compositionality. In general, the results seem to support a hybrid view of idiom representation and comprehension. According to the evaluation scores, we further concluded that CYs consisting of just one SM are less likely to be decomposable than those with a VOVO composition, and also less likely to be recognized through their constituent words, or to be familiar to, known by, or encountered by users. CYs with an SMSM composition are less likely than VOVO CYs to be decomposable or to be known or encountered by users. Experimental studies should investigate how a CY's syntactic structure influences its representation and comprehension.

When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG)

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.

Familiarity breeds dissent: Reliability analyses for British-English idioms on measures of familiarity, meaning, literality, and decomposability

To date, there have been several attempts made to build a database of normative data for English idiomatic expressions (e.g., Libben & Titone, 2008; Titone & Connine, 1994), however, there has been some discussion in the literature as to the validity and reliability of the data obtained, particularly for decomposability ratings. Our work aimed to address these issues by looking at ratings from native and non-native speakers and to extend the deeper investigation and analysis of decomposability to other aspects of idiomatic expressions, namely familiarly, meaning and literality. Poor reliability was observed on all types of ratings, suggesting that rather than decomposability being a special case, individual variability plays a large role in how participants rate idiomatic phrases in general. Ratings from native and non-native speakers were positively correlated and an analysis of covariance found that once familiarity with an idiom was accounted for, most of the differences between native and non-native ratings were not significant. Overall, the results suggest that individual experience with idioms plays an important role in how they are perceived and this should be taken into account when selecting stimuli for experimental studies. Furthermore, the results are suggestive of the inability of speakers to inhibit the figurative meanings for idioms that they are highly familiar with.