Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:12:27.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of aging and noncanonical form presentation on idiom processing: Evidence from eye tracking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2020

Katja I. Haeuser Open the ORCID record for Katja I. Haeuser [Opens in a new window] ,
Shari Baum  and
Debra Titone
Katja I. Haeuser*
Affiliation:
Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
Shari Baum
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Debra Titone
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: khaeuser@coli.uni-saarland.de.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Comprehending idioms (e.g., bite the bullet) requires that people appreciate their figurative meanings while suppressing literal interpretations of the phrase. While much is known about idioms, an open question is how healthy aging and noncanonical form presentation affect idiom comprehension when the task is to read sentences silently for comprehension. Here, younger and older adults read sentences containing idioms or literal phrases, while we monitored their eye movements. Idioms were presented in a canonical or a noncanonical form (e.g., bite the iron bullet). To assess whether people integrate figurative or literal interpretations of idioms, a disambiguating region that was figuratively or literally biased followed the idiom in each sentence. During early stages of reading, older adults showed facilitation for canonical idioms, suggesting a greater sensitivity to stored idiomatic forms. During later stages of reading, older adults showed slower reading times when canonical idioms were biased toward their literal interpretation, suggesting they were more likely to interpret idioms figuratively on the first pass. In contrast, noncanonical form presentation slowed comprehension of figurative meanings comparably in younger and older participants. We conclude that idioms may be more strongly entrenched in older adults, and that noncanonical form presentation slows comprehension of figurative meanings.

Keywords

agingeye trackingidiomssentence processingreading
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 101 - 127
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bobrow, S., & Bell, S. (1973). On catching on to idiomatic expressions. Memory & Cognition, 1, 343–346.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bohrn, I. C., Altmann, U., & Jacobs, A. M. (2012). Looking at the brains behind figurative language—A quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on metaphor, idiom, and irony processing. Neuropsychologia, 50, 2669–2683.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Braver, T. S., Barch, D. M., Keys, B. A., Carter, C. S., Cohen, J. D., Kaye, J. A., … Jagust, W. J. (2001). Context processing in older adults: Evidence for a theory relating cognitive control to neurobiology in healthy aging. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 746–763.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Braver, T. S., Paxton, J. L., Locke, H. S., & Barch, D. M. (2009). Flexible neural mechanisms of cognitive control within human prefrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 7351–7356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 977–990.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Burke, D. M., & Shafto, M. A. (2008). Language and aging. In Craik, F. & Salthouse, T. (Eds.), The handbook of aging and cognition (pp. 373–443). New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Cacciari, C. (2014). Processing multiword idiomatic strings: Many words in one? Mental Lexicon, 9, 267–293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacciari, C., Corrardini, P., & Ferlazzo, F. (2018). Cognitive and personality components underlying spoken idiom comprehension in context. An exploratory study. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 659.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cacciari, C., & Glucksberg, S. (1991). Understanding idiomatic expressions: The contribution of word meanings. In Simpson, G. B. (Ed.), Understanding word and sentence (pp. 217–240). Amsterdam: North-Holland.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacciari, C., & Tabossi, P. (1988). The comprehension of idioms. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 668–683.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caillies, S., & Butcher, K. (2007). Processing of idiomatic expressions: Evidence for a new hybrid view. Metaphor and Symbol, 22, 79–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caplan, D., & Waters, G. S. (1999). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 77–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caplan, D., & Waters, G. (2007). The relationship between age, processing speed, working memory capacity, and language comprehension. Memory, 13, 403–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrol, G., & Conklin, K. (2014). Eye-tracking multi-word units: Some methodological questions. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 7, 1–11.Google Scholar
Carrol, G., & Conklin, K. (2017). Cross language lexical priming extends to formulaic units: Evidence from eye-tracking suggests that this idea “has legs.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 299–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrol, G., & Conklin, K. (2020). Is all formulaic language created equal? Unpacking the processing advantage for different types of formulaic sequences. Language and Speech, 63, 95–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cieslicka, A. B., Heredia, R. R., & Olivares, M. (2014). It’s all in the eyes: How language dominance, salience, and context affect eye movements during idiomatic language processing. In Pawlak, M. & Aronin, L. (Eds.), Essential topics in applied linguistics and multilingualism (pp. 21–42). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coane, J. H., Sánchez-Gutiérrez, C., Stillman, C. M., & Corriveau, J. A. (2014). False memory for idiomatic expressions in younger and older adults: Evidence for indirect activation of figurative meanings. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 764.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Columbus, G., Sheikh, N., Côté-Lecaldare, M., Haeuser, K., Baum, S., & Titone, D. (2015). Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: An eye movement study of sentence reading. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 1057.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Conner, P., Hyun, J., O’Connor Wells, B., Anema, I., Goral, M., Monereau-Merry, M., … Obler, L. (2011). Age-related differences in idiom production in adultdhood. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 25, 899–912.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutting, J. C., & Bock, K. (1997). That’s the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blends. Memory & Cognition, 25, 57–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fellbaum, C. (2019). How flexible are idioms? A corpus-based study. Linguistics, 57, 735–767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geeraert, K., Newman, J., & Baayen, R. H. (2017a). Idiom variation: Experimental data and a blueprint of a computational model. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9, 653–669.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geeraert, K., Baayen, R. H., & Newman, J. (2017b). Understanding idiomatic variation. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (pp. 80–90). Valencia, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2007). Data analysis using regression and multilevel hierarchical models (Vol. 1). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (1980). Spilling the beans on understanding and memory for idioms in conversation. Memory & Cognition, 8, 149–156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. W. Jr., & Nayak, N. P. (1989). Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behavior of idioms. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 100–138.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. W. Jr, Nayak, N. P., & Cutting, C. (1989). How to kick the bucket and not decompose: Analyzability and idiom processing. Journal of Memory & Language, 28, 576–593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E. (2013). The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 88–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glucksberg, S. (2001). Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grady, C. L., & Craik, F. I. (2000). Changes in memory processing with age. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 10, 224–231.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grindrod, C. M., & Raizen, A. L. (2019). Age-related changes in processing speed modulate context use during idiomatic ambiguity resolution. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 26, 842–864.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haeuser, K. I., Titone, D. A., & Baum, S. R. (2016). The role of the ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex in idiom comprehension: An rTMS study. Neuropsychologia, 91, 360–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallett, P. E. (1978). Primary and secondary saccades to goals defined by instructions. Vision Research, 18, 1279–1296.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hasher, L., Stoltzfus, E. R., Zacks, R. T., & Rypma, B. (1991). Age and inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 163–169.Google ScholarPubMed
Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. (1988). Working memory, comprehension, and aging: A review and a new view. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 22, 193–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasher, L., Zacks, R. T., & May, C. P. (1998). Inhibitory control, circadian arousal, and age. In Gopher, D. & Koriat, A. (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII: Cognitive regulation of performance. Interaction of theory and application (pp. 653–675). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hedden, T., & Gabrieli, J. (2004). Insights into the ageing mind: A view from cognitive neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 87–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hung, P., & Nippold, M. (2014). Idiom understanding in adulthood: Examining age-related differences. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 28, 208–221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyun, J., Conner, P. S., & Obler, L. K. (2014). Idiom properties influencing idiom production in younger and older adults. Mental Lexicon, 9, 294–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kliegl, R., Grabner, E., Rolfs, M., & Engbert, R. (2004). Length, frequency, and predictability effects of words on eye movements in reading. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 262–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kyriacou, M., Conklin, K., & Thompson, D. (2019). Passivizability of idioms: Has the wrong tree been barked up? Language and Speech, 63, 404–435.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Langlotz, A. (2006). Idiomatic creativity: A cognitive-linguistic model of idiom-representation and idiom-variation in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, S. C., Lindenberger, U., & Sikström, S. (2001). Aging cognition: From neuromodulation to representation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 479–486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Libben, M., & Titone, D. (2008). The multidetermined nature of idiom processing. Memory & Cognition, 36, 1103–1121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lindenberger, U. (2014). Human cognitive aging: Corriger la fortune? Science, 346, 572–578.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Linzen, T., & Oseki, Y. (2018). The reliability of acceptability judgments across languages. Glossa, 3, 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mancuso, A., Elia, A., Laudanna, A., & Vietri, S. (2019). The role of syntactic variability and literal interpretation plausibility in idiom comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Advance online publication.Google Scholar
McGlone, M. S., Glucksberg, S., & Cacciari, C. (1994). Semantic productivity and idiom comprehension. Discourse Processes, 17, 167–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milburn, E., & Warren, T. (2019). Idioms show effects of meaning relatedness and dominance similar to those seen for ambiguous words. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 591–598.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Molinaro, N., Canal, P., Vespignani, F., Pesciarelli, F., & Cacciari, C. (2013). Are complex function words processed as semantically empty strings? A reading time and ERP study of collocational complex prepositions. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 762–788.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morey, R. D. (2008). Confidence intervals from normalized data: A correction to Cousineau (2005). Tutorial in Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 4, 61–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munoz, D. P., & Everling, S. (2004). Look away: The anti-saccade task and the voluntary control of eye movement. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 218–228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nunberg, G., Sag, I., & Wasow, T. (1994). Idioms. Language, 70, 491–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papagno, C., Lucchelli, F., Muggia, S., & Rizzo, S. (2003). Idiom comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease: The role of the central executive. Brain, 126, 2419–2430.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Schneider, B. A., & Daneman, M. (1995). How young and old adults listen to and remember speech in noise. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 593–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radach, R., & Kennedy, A. (2004). Theoretical perspectives on eye movements in reading: Past controversies, current deficits and an agenda for future research. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rapp, A. M., Mutschler, D. E., & Erb, M. (2012). Where in the brain is nonliteral language? A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Neuroimage, 63, 600–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372–422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rayner, K. (2009). The thirty-fifth Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: Eye movements and attention during reading, scene perception, and visual search. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1457–1506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rayner, K., & Duffy, S. (1986). Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory & Cognition, 14, 191–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rayner, K., Warren, T., Juhasz, B. J., & Liversedge, S. P. (2004). The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 1290–1301.Google ScholarPubMed
R Development Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. (Version 3.5.1; Feather Spray) [Computer Software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Rizzo, S., Sandrini, M., & Papagno, C. (2007). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in idiom interpretation: An rTMS study. Brain Research Bulletin, 71, 523–528.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, 103, 403–428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A. (2000). Aging and measures of processing speed. Biological Psychology, 54, 35–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schad, D. J., Vasishth, S., Hohenstein, S., & Kliegl, R. (2020). How to capitalize on a priori contrasts in linear (mixed) models: A tutorial. Journal of Memory and Language, 110, 104038.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schettino, A., Lauro, L. R., Crippa, F., Anselmetti, S., Cavallaro, R., & Papagno, C. (2010). The comprehension of idiomatic expressions in schizophrenic patients. Neuropsychologia, 48, 1032–1040.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schröder, D. (2013). The syntactic flexibility of idioms: A corpus-based approach. München, Germany: Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München.Google Scholar
Schütze, C. T. (2016). The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology (Classics in Linguistics 2). Berlin: Language Science Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K., & Schmitt, N. (2011). Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye-tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers. Second Language Research, 27, 251–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smolka, E., & Eulitz, C. (2019). Can you reach for the planets or grasp at the stars? Modified noun, verb, or preposition constituents in idiom processing. Psyarxiv prepreints. doi:10.31234/osf.io/3sve4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprenger, S., La Roi, A., & van Rij, J. (2019). The development of idiom knowledge across the lifespan. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprenger, S. A., Levelt, W. J., & Kempen, G. (2006). Lexical access during the production of idiomatic phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 161–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swinney, D., & Cutler, A. (1979). The access and processing of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 523–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tabossi, P., Fanari, R., & Wolf, K. (2008). Processing idiomatic expressions: Effects of semantic compositionality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 313–327.Google ScholarPubMed
Tabossi, P., Wolf, K., & Koterle, S. (2009). Idiom syntax: Idiosyncratic or principled? Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 77–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Titone, D., Columbus, G., Whitford, V., Mercier, J., & Libben, M. (2015). Contrasting bilingual and monolingual idiom processing. In Heredia, R. R. & Cieślicka, A. B. (Eds.), Bilingual figurative language processing (pp. 171–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Titone, D., & Connine, C. (1999). On the compositional and noncompositional nature of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 1655–1674.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Titone, D., & Libben, M. (2014). Time-dependent effects of decomposability, familiarity and literal plausibility on idiom priming: A cross-modal priming investigation. Mental Lexicon, 9, 473–496.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Titone, D., Lovseth, K., Kasparian, K., & Tiv, M. (2019). Are figurative interpretations of idioms directly retrieved, compositionally built, or both? Evidence from eye movement measures of reading. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73, 216–230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Verhaeghen, P., & Cerella, J. (2002). Aging, executive control, and attention: A review of meta-analyses. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 26, 849–857.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Warren, T., McConnell, K., & Rayner, K. (2008). Effects of context on eye movements when reading about possible and impossible events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 1001–1010.Google ScholarPubMed
Westbury, C., & Titone, D. (2011). Idiom literality judgments in younger and older adults: Age-related effects in resolving semantic interference. Psychology and Aging, 26, 467–474.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wingfield, A., Aberdeen, J. S., & Stine, E. A. (1991). Word onset gating and linguistic context in spoken word recognition by young and elderly adults. Journal of Gerontology, 46, 127–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wingfield, A., & Lash, A. (2016). Audition and the comprehension of spoken language in adult aging: Stability in the face of change. In Schaie, K. W. and Willis, S. (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (pp. 165–185). London: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar