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

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Beate Abel 345As the analysis of information gained from the biographicalquestionnaire shows, nonnative speakers who are frequentlyexposed to idioms because they read English literary texts everyday start to judge idioms as nondecomposable more often, just asnative speakers do. This is taken as evidence in favour of theunderlying representations, i.e., the existence of idiom entries.The fact that frequency has an effect on mental representationsis one of the most replicated results of many psycholinguisticexperiments. Therefore, its integration into the DIR Model isnecessary and independently supported by these studies. Here toomorphological studies provide further evidence. For example,Caramazza et al. (1988), who postulated the Augmented AddressedMorphology Model for derived and inflected words, experimentallysupported a fundamental differentiation between frequent and lessfrequent words: whereas the former have word entries, the latterare decomposed into their individual morphemes before access andcomprehension take place. Similarly, Frauenfelder and Schreuder(1992) assumed in their Morphological Race Model thatmorphologically complex words are represented via their individualmorphemes but have their own entries as well. In processing, bothrepresentations are activated. The frequency and transparency(decomposability) of the word being processed determine which‘route’ is quicker. Transparent, i.e., decomposable word forms of lowfrequency are accessed via the decomposition route whereas wordsof high frequency are accessed via their full entry, regardless of theirmorphological or semantic structure. A transfer of these findings toidioms confirms the second assumption. An idiom’s frequencydetermines how it is represented. That is why decomposable idiomsthat are frequent enough can develop an idiom entry.Note that the second assumption is about frequency, notfamiliarity. How does the finding that natives and nonnatives judgedecomposable idioms as more familiar fit in with the first andsecond assumptions? It is argued here that familiarity andfrequency refer to two distinct aspects. Frequency denotes an‘objective’ occurrence that can be statistically captured (Baayen,1992; 1993; Baayen and Lieber, 1997), while familiarity is a‘subjective’ measure, that cannot be determined in a mathematicalway. At the linguistic or lexical level, where the first twoassumptions apply, frequency is relevant, whereas familiarity playsa role at the conceptual level. The difference between frequencyand familiarity is reflected in the instructions given to theparticipants taking part in the studies in question. For example,Titone and Connine (1994: 255) have their participants rate theidiom’s meaningfulness (‘how well you know the meaning of theDownloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009
346 English idioms in the L1 and L2 lexiconidiom’) and its frequency (‘rate the idiom’s frequency of occurrenceindependently from [sic] whether or not you know its meaning’).Taken together, the two measures comprised Titone and Connine’sfamiliarity scale. 8 The present study used the meaningfulnessinstructionsto measure familiarity, because the frequencyinstructionsare difficult enough to answer for native speakers, letalone nonnatives. The results were compared to Titone andConnine’s (1994: 265ff) meaningfulness data. The analyses showedthat both native and nonnative speakers judged decomposableidioms as more familiar, or rather ‘meaningful’, than nondecomposableidioms.It is argued here that the relationship between frequency andfamiliarity is a unidirectional one: A frequently occurring idiom willbe judged as familiar, but a familiar idiom is not necessarily afrequent one. Native speakers in fact encounter both types ofidioms quite often and therefore have a lot of idiom entries, becausefrequency is responsible for the development of idiom entries atthe lexical level. For natives, decomposable and nondecomposableidioms are similar in familiarity (5.92 and 5.76 respectively) and ofhigher familiarity than for nonnatives (4.90 and 2.99). This isbecause frequency influences familiarity, but not vice versa. If thiswere the case, one would have to conclude that for both groupsdecomposable idioms were more frequent than nondecomposableones, which seems unlikely. The fact that both groups judgedecomposable idioms as more familiar than nondecomposableidioms can be explained if it is assumed that familiarity, unlikefrequency, is not relevant at the linguistic level, but at theconceptual level. This is discussed in the next paragraph.To conclude this discussion of the first two assumptions of theDIR Model it should be noted that they are comparable to theexisting processing hypotheses discussed above in that they restrictthemselves to the lexical level. Representations at a lexical level,however, are only sufficient if the existence of separate idiomentries is considered to be a necessary precondition for idiomprocessing. This is the underlying assumption made in all studiescarried out with native speakers and discussed earlier. However, thestudies with nonnative speakers have shown that sometimes idiomentries are nonexistent. In that case, processing is possible but onlyif conceptual representations are integrated.8In three experimental studies, Schweigert (1986; 1991; Schweigert and Moates, 1988)distinguished between highly familiar, less familiar and unfamiliar idioms. However, she useda different definition of familiarity and did not consider decomposability.Downloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009
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