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The role of sentence context in idiom disambiguation: an ERP study

Poster C65 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Marta Vergara-Martinez¹, Nadina Gomez¹, Inmaculada Fajardo¹; ¹ERI-Lectura, Universitat de Valencia

Language in everyday conversations is full of multiword expressions such as idioms (i.e. “spill the beans”; “bite the dust”; “break the ice”). Idioms’ meaning is conventional and unrelated to the specific meaning of the individual words. Idiom comprehension challenge the principle of compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression not always results from the meaning of its parts. In contrast, it calls for a retrieval mechanism where idiom recognition as a familiar expression occurs along with its meaning retrieval from memory (Cacciari, 2014; Titone & Connine, 1994). Of interest for neurocognitive researchers, the cognitive operations underlying the composition and retrieval comprehension strategies have different electrophysiological ERP signatures. The N400 is a marker of semantic compositionality, as it reflects semantic integration between word meaning, world knowledge and mental representations of the ongoing sentence processing. The (late) P300 is related to categorical template matching between stored information and input processing. Final target words within idioms (i.e. “beans” in “spill the beans”) compared to the same words in literal contexts, elicit smaller N400s and larger P300s (Rommers et al, 2013; Canal et al, 2017), a pattern of results in line with non-compositional status of figurative interpretation. However, while this might be true for opaque idioms such as “bite the dust”, ambiguous idioms such as “break the ice” are excellent exemplars to test the intricacies of literal and idiomatic processing of the very same sequences of words. Besides, they allow testing for semantic and pragmatic integration processes during sentence comprehension, as the disambiguation of the idiom (either literal or figurative) depends on the correct processing of the preceding context. The main aim of our study was to address the cognitive mechanisms of idiom disambiguation. We used the N400 paradigm (semantically congruent vs incongruent target words preceded by high constraining context; Federmeier & Kutas, 1997) to characterize the successful integration of contextual information when idiomatic expressions are to be understood. 57 participants were presented with ambiguous Spanish idioms (i.e. “romper el hielo”; “break the ice”, in English) embedded in sentences that strongly biased readers towards the literal or the idiomatic meaning. In half of the sentences, the idiom’s last word (i.e. “ice” in “break the ice”) was replaced by a semantically incongruent word. Hence, we combined the factors Idiomatic meaning (figurative, literal) and semantic congruity (congruent, incongruent) to test for N400 and P300 effects. Our preliminary results revealed: i) N400 (300-500ms) congruity effects only slightly larger for the literal compared to the figurative condition: ii) P300 (500-700 ms) idiomatic effects with larger positive amplitudes for the target word in the idiomatic condition compared to the literal condition. Hence, in ambiguous idioms the difference between basic composition (literal interpretation) and enriched integration (figurative interpretation) was mainly observed in the 500-700ms (frontal positivity), in the same line as Canal et al, 2017. Our results suggest that compositionality strategies of semantic interpretation are not cancelled out in the processing of ambiguous idiomatic expressions at least not before 500ms post-stimuli.

Topic Areas: Meaning: Combinatorial Semantics, Reading