English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: a ...

338 English idioms in the L1 and L2 lexiconparticipants were asked to give a dichotomous decision, i.e., todecide whether they judged the idiom to be decomposable ornondecomposable. The instructions first introduced the term idiomand told the participants that the booklet lists idioms and theirparaphrases. Then the participants were given the followinginstructions, which were a very close translation of the instructionsused by Titone and Connine (1994: 256), who took their instructionsdirectly from Gibbs and his colleagues (see, for example, Gibbs andNayak, 1989: 108–09):Your task is to sort the following idioms into two categories: idioms whoseindividual words contribute to their overall figurative meaning (so-calleddecomposable idioms) and idioms whose individual words do not contribute totheir overall figurative meaning (so-called nondecomposable idioms). Anexample of a decomposable idiom would be play the market, which means ‘tryto make money on the stock market by buying and selling stocks’. The wordplay relates to ‘try to make money’, and market refers to the stock market. Anexample of a nondecomposable idiom would be chew the fat, which means ‘talkabout affairs or events, especially those of other people, in a careless way’. Theindividual word meanings do not relate to the meaning of the idiom.Note that the example idiom, its constituents and the paraphrasewere given in English, although the rest of the instructions were inGerman. As mentioned above, the native participants in the studiesby Gibbs and Nayak (1989) and Titone and Connine (1994) had tosubdivide the idioms they rated as decomposable into normally andabnormally decomposable ones, thus creating a third category. Thenonnative study reported here was restricted to the initial,dichotomous decision, because Titone and Connine’s results (1994)have convincingly shown that this third category is awkward and ofvery low psychological plausibility.In order to rate the familiarity of an idiom, participants wereasked to use a 7-point scale. They were given a booklet that containedthe idioms and that started with the following instructions:For each of the following idioms, you will have to decide how well you knowthe meaning of the idiom. Make your ratings on a scale of 1 to 7. A rating of1 would mean that you have absolutely no idea what the idiom means, a 4 thatyou are moderately certain of what it means, and a 7 would indicate that youknow exactly what the idiom means and could easily put it into your own words.Again, the instructions were translated from Titone and Connine(1994: 255; for a detailed discussion of problems with theseinstructions, see below). The instructions concluded by giving twoexamples. After they had worked through the list of idioms, theparticipants were given an additional task which asked them tochoose three of the idioms they rated with 7 and to write down themeaning of each idiom in their own words. Although this task wasDownloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009