Research On The Auditory Lexicalization Of Chinese Idioms With Different Structures

Cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology opened up a new way for us to study idiom understanding from a different perspective, therefore idiom understanding has attracted a lot of attention of psycholinguists. Up till now, various views on idiom understanding exist due to different experimental materials, experimental paradigms or experimental tasks. Specifically, four major models of idiom comprehension have been suggested: 1) idiom comprehension is noncompositional, that is, an idiom is a word in the mental lexicon, it cannot be decomposed, and the figurative meaning of an idiom could be directly accessed without activating its literal meaning; 2) idiom comprehension is compositional, that is, the literal and figurative meanings of idioms are represented separately, in which the literal meaning plays an important role in understanding its corresponding figurative meaning; 3) idiom comprehension is hybrid, in that the process of figurative meaning understanding is holistic and noncompositional; while the process of literal meaning understanding is compositional, and it aids in figurative understanding; 4)The salience of literal or figurative aspect of an idiom influences the understanding of this idiom. The processing of the salient meaning of an idiom is automatic and always accessed first, without being affected by context.Idioms are frequently used in spoken language, therefore it is important to know how idioms are processed via auditory pathways. Two experiments were conducted in this study. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to do an idiom decision task in order to investigate whether or not semantic biased and semantic transparent idioms with different structure idioms have been lexicalized in the mental lexicons. The results showed that the response times of VP (verb phrase) structure idioms were significantly longer than those of non-idiomatic trisyllabic words, which indicated that the VP idioms have not been lexicalized. The results also showed that the response times of attributive structure idioms which were semantic biased and high transparent or literal semantic biased and high transparent were the same as those of non-idiomatic trisyllabic words, which indicated that the former two structure idioms have not been lexicalized. In Experiment 2, the lexicalized or almost lexicalized idioms were further investigated by a priming paradigm. The results indicated that the attributive structure idioms which were equal semantic biased and high transparent have been lexicalized, and its comprehension mechanism supported the lexicon representation hypothesis. In addition, it seems that it was the interaction of semantic bias and transparency that caused the non-lexicalization of attributive structure idioms which have literal semantic bias and high transparency.In summary, meaning transparency seems to plays a role in idiom comprehension, the higher the transparency the better. The semantic bias has no effect in VP idiom comprehension, while there was significant main effect of semantic bias in understanding attributive idioms. The results of this study supported the graded salience hypothesis.