Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

Metaphors are known to present both opportunities and challenges for second language learners, but relatively little is known about learners' awareness of them. To investigate this, we analyzed 72 argumentative essays written in English by a group of 37 intermediate Chinese university students of English. We identified metaphors using an…

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…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Learning idioms has always been difficult for L2 learners of English. Drawing on a cognitive linguistic perspective of idiom learning, this paper reports on an empirical study that investigated the effects of incorporating the knowledge of conceptual metaphor and metonymy in L2 classroom instruction of English idioms. The study confirmed the…

Learning language is always a challenge. A more daunting task is learning those culturally bound aspects of language. The present study examines the ability of Jordanian EFL learners to comprehend culturally bound color expressions. It also investigates whether L1 transfer plays a role in their processing of color idioms. To achieve this goal, I…

The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e.,…

This study examines how adult second language learners acquire the different meanings of the Spanish preposition "a". Cognitive linguistic models predict that spatial meanings are acquired first, as they are conceptually basic and are the source from which other meanings derive via natural cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and…

An affective priming task was used with two cohorts of college students, one deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH), the other hearing, in two experiments. The same set of affective-word targets, preceded by "[Chinese characters omitted]" in Experiment 1 but by affective-word primes of the same valence as the targets in Experiment 2, were…

This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to comprehend metaphorical expressions in English and investigates whether the use of their first language (L1) conceptual and linguistic knowledge may facilitate the comprehension of these expressions. For this purpose, the study adopts a contrastive…

Idiom transparency refers to how speakers think the meaning of the individual words contributes to the figurative meaning of an idiom as a whole (Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989). However, it is not clear how speakers or language learners form their assumptions about an idiom's transparency level. This study set out to discover whether there are…

In the present investigation, 15 first term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in English (L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively, 30 of which were in the source domain of animals, commonly used in both languages, and asked to explain their meaning. The idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. Three main research…

Idioms have long been regarded as problematic for L2 learners due to the arbitrariness of their meanings and forms. Traditional methods of teaching idioms focus on rote learning and memorization. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics research have considered idioms as analyzable expressions which are motivated by conceptual metaphors and…