TY - JOUR
T1 - “Going to town”
T2 - Large-scale norming and statistical analysis of 870 American English idioms
AU - Bulkes, Nyssa Z.
AU - Tanner, Darren
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by a University of Illinois Campus Research Board Grant RB14158, awarded to D.T.. We thank the members of the Electrophysiology and Language Processing Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for assistance with data entry and quantification, and Joseph Roy for helpful discussions about data analysis. We also thank the audience of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 7 conference for helpful comments on an earlier version of this work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Psychonomic Society, Inc.
PY - 2017/4/1
Y1 - 2017/4/1
N2 - An idiom is classically defined as a formulaic sequence whose meaning is comprised of more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, idioms pose a unique problem for models of sentence processing, as researchers must take into account how idioms vary and along what dimensions, as these factors can modulate the ease with which an idiomatic interpretation can be activated. In order to help ensure external validity and comparability across studies, idiom research benefits from the availability of publicly available resources reporting ratings from a large number of native speakers. Resources such as the one outlined in the current paper facilitate opportunities for consensus across studies on idiom processing and help to further our goals as a research community. To this end, descriptive norms were obtained for 870 American English idioms from 2,100 participants along five dimensions: familiarity, meaningfulness, literal plausibility, global decomposability, and predictability. Idiom familiarity and meaningfulness strongly correlated with one another, whereas familiarity and meaningfulness were positively correlated with both global decomposability and predictability. Correlations with previous norming studies are also discussed.
AB - An idiom is classically defined as a formulaic sequence whose meaning is comprised of more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, idioms pose a unique problem for models of sentence processing, as researchers must take into account how idioms vary and along what dimensions, as these factors can modulate the ease with which an idiomatic interpretation can be activated. In order to help ensure external validity and comparability across studies, idiom research benefits from the availability of publicly available resources reporting ratings from a large number of native speakers. Resources such as the one outlined in the current paper facilitate opportunities for consensus across studies on idiom processing and help to further our goals as a research community. To this end, descriptive norms were obtained for 870 American English idioms from 2,100 participants along five dimensions: familiarity, meaningfulness, literal plausibility, global decomposability, and predictability. Idiom familiarity and meaningfulness strongly correlated with one another, whereas familiarity and meaningfulness were positively correlated with both global decomposability and predictability. Correlations with previous norming studies are also discussed.
KW - Figurative language
KW - Idioms
KW - Language norms
KW - Language processing
KW - Nonliteral language
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U2 - 10.3758/s13428-016-0747-8
DO - 10.3758/s13428-016-0747-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 27496172
AN - SCOPUS:84982932029
SN - 1554-351X
VL - 49
SP - 772
EP - 783
JO - Behavior Research Methods
JF - Behavior Research Methods
IS - 2
ER -