On-line idiom processing by second language learners of English

On-line idiom processing by second language learners of English
Zainab Ghareeb-Ali
University of Essex

http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/department/events/egcl/egcl14/abstracts/z.ghareeb-ali.pdf

Idiomatic expressions form a very important part of natural language, thus must be
accounted for by any theory of language processing and comprehension. Examining how
idioms are dealt with and processed in a second language (L2) is an issue worth investigating
since it may give language teachers a better idea of some of the strategies L2 learners use in
order to interpret figurative language.
The proposals made by researchers about L2 idiom processing differ in terms of the
status they assign to figurative versus literal meanings when comprehending idioms. For
example, while Nelson (1992) claims that L2 learners directly access the figurative meaning
of the idiom, Liontas (2002), on the other hand, hypothesized that L2 learners comprehend
idiomatic phrases by initially processing the idiom literally and only then retrieve the
figurative interpretation (i.e. literal processing must precede the access of the idiomatic
meaning).
A pilot study was conducted using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to
investigate the processing of idiomatic expressions in second language (L2) learners, based
on the assumption of the Literal-Salience Resonant Model of L2 idiom comprehension
developed by Cieślicka (2006). Regardless of familiarity or contextual bias, this view
presumes that processing idioms involves an obligatory computation of the literal
interpretations of the words making up the idiomatic string. Therefore, the hypothesis of the
current study is that literal targets (i.e. words related literally to the idiomatic expression)
should demonstrate a significant priming advantage over idiomatic targets (i.e. words related
figuratively to the idiomatic phrase) in L2 idiom comprehension. The idiomatic expressions
employed in this experiment were characterised as being non-literal and non-decomposable.
Thus, individual constituents in the idiom phrase barely contribute to the overall figurative
meaning of the given idiom. All idioms were embedded in neutral contexts. The non-native
speakers who participated in the experiment consisted of 40 advanced Kuwaiti learners of
English. There was a control group of 20 native speakers of English.
The results revealed that the non-native speakers performed similarly to the native
speakers in that both language groups showed higher priming effects for target words related
to the literal meaning of the last word in the idiom string than for targets related to the overall
figurative interpretation of the idiom. This implies that literal meanings are activated more
than the figurative. Thus, it is suggested that literal reading of idioms is not optional and
always comes prior to retrieving the figurative meaning when processing idioms. In sum,
findings of the current study provide support to the Literal-Salience Resonant Model. This
finding also fits with the results from an eye-tracking study by Conklin (2008), who found
that non-native speakers had longer reading times to figurative uses than to literal ones,
suggesting that the figurative meaning is not activated as quickly as the literal.