Dissociating Semantic and Syntactic Processing in Idiom Comprehension: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study
Idioms like kick the bucket are special kinds of phrases whose meanings are not just the combined meanings of their words. This study examined whether idioms were processed in the same way as literal, non-idiomatic language, by measuring brainwaves while people read sentences, following up on a study by Peterson, Burgess, Dell and Eberhard (2001). Sentence contexts that strongly predicted a particular final word were created and normed for both idioms and literal phrases, using a cloze probability task. The norming procedure eliminated 335-paired sets yielding 108 context constraining sentences (54 literal, 54 idiom). The N400 and P600 brainwave components, each sensitive to different aspects of language processing, were used to tap into how idioms are processed. If results agree with Peterson et al.'s results then implications can help in the advancement of human machine communication and teaching comprehension to non-native speakers of a language.
School:
San Diego State University
Department:
Psychology / Neurosciences
Research Advisor:
Susam Garnsey
Department of Research Advisor:
Psychology
Year of Publication:
2003