dioms can have both a literal interpretation and a figurativeinterpretation (e.g., to “kick the bucket”). Which interpretationshould be activated can be disambiguated by a preceding context(e.g., “The old man was sick. He kicked the bucket.”). We investigatedwhether the idiomatic and literal uses of idioms have differentpredictive properties when the idiom has been biased towarda literal or figurative sentence interpretation. EEG was recorded asparticipants performed a lexical decision task on idiom-finalwordsin biased idioms and literal (compositional) sentences. Targets inidioms were identified faster in both figuratively and literally usedidioms than in compositional sentences. Time–frequency analysisof a prestimulus interval revealed relatively more alpha–betapower decreases in literally than figuratively used idiomaticsequences and compositional sentences. We argue that lexicosemanticretrieval plays a larger role in literally than figurativelybiased idioms, as retrieval of the word meaning is less relevantin the latter and the word form has to be matched to a template.The results are interpreted in terms of context integration andword retrieval and have implications for models of language processingand predictive processing in general.
展开▼
