DESCRIPTIVE NORMS FOR 171 IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS - FAMILIARITY, COMPOSITIONALITY, PREDICTABILITY, AND LITERALITY

Descriptive norms for 171 idiomatic expressions rated by 226 subjects on the dimensions of familiarity, compositionality, predictability, an d literality are reported. Different theoretical positions concerning the comprehension of idioms are discussed, and the relevance of each d imension to idiom processing is described. The dimension of predictabi lity correlated significantly with alternative ratings of familiarity. Literality negatively correlated with abnormal decomposability. Incon sistencies between the compositionality ratings obtained in the presen t study and prior studies (e.g., Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989) are no ted.