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Reference
Cutting, J. C. & Bock, J. K. (1997). That's the way the cookie
bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited
idiom blends. Memory & Cognition.25,57-71.
Abstract
Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that
are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. Three
experiments explored the nature of idiomatic representation with a speech-
error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms.
After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and
their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first
experiment showed greater interference between idioms with the same syntactic
structure, demonstrating that idiomatic representations contain syntactic
information. The second experiment indicated that the literal meaning of an
idiom is active during production. These syntactic and literal-semantic
effects on idiomatic errors argue against a representation of idioms as
noncomponential lexicalized phrases. The final experiment found no
differences between decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting
that the lexical representation of these two types of idioms is the same.
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Last Modified: 31 July 1998
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