Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L2 learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Six experiments (N=194 undergraduates) examined why some idioms can be syntactically changed and still retain their figurative meanings, while others cannot be syntactically altered without losing their figurative meanings. Idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall meanings were judged as more syntactically-flexible…