The ability to understand ambiguous idiom was assessed in aphasic patients with preserved comprehension at a single word level. A string-to-word matching task was used in which patients were requested to choose one among four alternatives: a word associated with the figurative meaning of the idiom string; a word semantically associate with the last constituent of the idiom string; and two unrel...

A standard view is that idioms present problems for compositionality. The question of compositionality, however, should be posed for a semantics, not for individual phrases. The paper focuses on the idiom extension problem: Suppose in a given language a certain phrase acquires the status of an idiom. How can the syntax and semantics be extended to accommodate the idiom, while preserving desirab...

This study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate EFL learners’ idiom learning. The participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in Zabansara Language School in Khorramabad based on their scores on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and an idiom test piloted in...

Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality: Some claim that idiomatic meaning is the result of compositional analysis initiated at the earliest stages of comprehension, whereas others claim that compositional analysis occurs only at late stages, subsequent to direct retrieval--especially for idioms that are highly familiar. We evaluated these alternati...

This paper describes the relative effectiveness of seven variables of three categories in predicting the readability of the EFL texts used in the Japanese context. The factors examined in our research were (1) word difficulty and (2) idiom difficulty, in addition to the commonly used variables, sentence length (SL) and word length (WL). In the analysis of word difficulty three measures were con...

Prediction is pervasive in human cognition and plays a central role in language comprehension. At an electrophysiological level, this cognitive function contributes substantially in determining the amplitude of the N400. In fact, the amplitude of the N400 to words within a sentence has been shown to depend on how predictable those words are: The more predictable a word, the smaller the N400 eli...

PURPOSE High-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves pragmatic impairment of language skills. Among numerous tasks for assessing pragmatic linguistic skills, idioms are important to evaluating high-functioning ASD. Nevertheless, no assessment tool has been developed with specific consideration of Korean culture. Therefore, we designed the Korean Autism Social Language Task (KASLAT) ...

idiomatic expressions are considered as a part of everyday language. in other words, they are the essence of each language and one of the most problematic parts to cope with, especially in the process of interlingual translation. furthermore, there is sometimes no one-to-one equivalent for the idioms of the source language (sl) in the target language (tl). this study aimed at investigating the ...

processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 2 Abstract Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared ...