Idiomatic expressions can be interpreted literally or figuratively. These two meanings are often processed in parallel or very rapidly, as evidenced by online measures of idiomatic processing. Because in many cases the figurative meaning cannot be derived from the component lexical elements and because of the speed with which this meaning is accessed, it is assumed such meanings are stored in s...

An account is given of flexible idiom processing within a lexicon based parser. The view is a compositional one. The parser's behaviour is basically the "literal" one, unless a certain threshold is crossed by the weight of a particular idiom. A new process will then be added. The parser, besides yielding all idiomatic and literal interpretations embodies some claims of human processing simulati...

This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. This query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. For this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a...

Detecting idioms in a sentence is important to sentence understanding. This paper discusses the linguistic knowledge for idiom detection. The challenges are that idioms can be ambiguous between literal and idiomatic meanings, and that they can be “transformed” when expressed in a sentence. However, there has been little research on Japanese idiom detection with its ambiguity and transformations...

In this paper, a novel chord transition representation (Cambouropoulos 2012), that draws on the interval function between two collections of notes proposed by Lewin (1959), is explored in a harmonic recognition task. This representation allows the encoding of chord transitions at a level higher that individual notes that is transposition-invariant and idiom-independent (analogous to pitch inter...

Traditional induction variables (IV) analyses focus on computing the closed form expressions of variables. This paper presents a new IV analysis based on an IV property called distance interval . This property captures the value changes of a variable along a given controlflow path of a program. Based on distance intervals, an efficient algorithm detects dependences for array accesses that invol...

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less like...