Resolving Figurative Expressions During Reading: The Role of Familiarity, Transparency, and Context

ABSTRACT

Native speakers understand familiar idioms (e.g., over the moon) and conventional metaphors (e.g., describing time as a doctor) quickly and easily. In two eye-tracking studies we considered how native speakers are able to make sense of fundamentally unfamiliar figurative expressions. In Experiment 1 compared with literal paraphrases of the same meaning, known idioms had a clear advantage, unknown idioms showed a significant disadvantage, and conventional metaphors showed no difference between figurative and literal versions. In Experiment 2 readers saw known and unknown idioms (or paraphrases) in contexts that either supported the intended meaning or were neutral. Strength of context had minimal effect on reading patterns for either idiom type and had no effect when readers were asked to subsequently identify the meaning. Context may be helpful in terms of sense selection but not when new senses need to be generated, at which point aspects such as transparency become more important.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Zipf scale (Van Heuven, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2014) is a logarithmic scale to express relative frequency, taking into account the size of the corpus. A value of 1 represents 1 occurrence per 100 million words, 2 represents 10 occurrences per 100 million words, 3 represents 100 occurrences, and so on.

2. For the phrase region we added the aggregate frequency score as a covariate to control for differences between figurative and literal phrases. Since the three phrase types varied considerably in length, we also included length of the phrase as an interaction with phrase type and condition, where model comparison showed this was an improvement over inclusion as a fixed effect.

3. Here and elsewhere, “fixed form” refers to the lexical composition for any given item. Hence, idioms are “fixed” in the sense that they are a specific combination of words that cannot be substituted or changed. Although the metaphors we chose all had the same general schema/structure “A is B,” their lexical composition is not fixed or formulaic in the same way as idioms.