THATS THE WAY THE COOKIE BOUNCES - SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC COMPONENTS OF EXPERIMENTALLY ELICITED IDIOM BLENDS

Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations t hat are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly v iewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce o ne of the two idioms, and their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first experiment showed greater interference betwee n idioms with the same syntactic structure, demonstrating that idiom r epresentations contain syntactic information. The second experiment in dicated that the literal meaning of an idiom is active during producti on. These syntactic and literal-semantic effects on idiom errors argue against a representation of idioms as noncomponential lexicalized phr ases. In the final experiment, no differences were found between de co mposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting that the lexical repre sentation of these two types of idioms is the same.