Comprehension of idioms
Contemporary researchers have also posited that different modes of processing are required for distinct types of idioms.
Recent neurolinguistic research has found, using various techniques, several neural substrates that are associated with idiom comprehension, such as the left temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex.
Non-compositional models in general assume that idioms are stored like long words in memory.
These findings reveal that idioms are not a homogeneous, distinct group and thus may not involve different processing strategies from those for literal expressions.
This suggests that when highly familiar idioms are encountered, people may not need to engage in literal processing or utilize conceptual metaphor to infer their meanings.
[6] Decomposable idioms are composed of words that literally contribute to their overall figurative meaning, e.g. pop the question.
It was found that children understand idiomatic expression more accurately when they are shown in informative contexts than when they are presented in isolation.
The ability to use contextual information in language processing has also been found to influence children’s performance in idiom comprehension.
However, later research has suggested that RBD patients’ difficulties in idiom comprehension, as demonstrated by sentence-to-picture matching task, may be due to deficits in their visuospatial abilities, rather than impairment in linguistic processing.
[14] Other researchers have hypothesized that comprehension of nondecomposable idioms mainly involved left hemispheric activity.
When healthy adults were studied, left temporal rTMS was found to influence the reaction time and accuracy of both idiom comprehension and literal sentence processing.
[15] Recent research with healthy adults using fMRI also found that, when processing idioms that were not literally interpretable (i.e., raining cats and dogs), the Broca’s area in the left prefronto-temporal network was activated.
In contrast, the left inferior parietal lobe and the right supramarginal gyrus were activated when literal sentences were presented.
Future research in this field should continue to investigate which brain regions are associated with idiom processing, in order to resolve the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension.
[18] A recent review suggested that the familiarity affect which brain region is activated during the comprehension of figurative language.
Additionally, future research could use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to explore the temporal dynamics of idiom comprehension.
Recent research using MEG has found that, when idioms containing action verbs (i.e. kick the bucket) were processed, motor regions of the brain were activated.
The anterior fronto-temporal cortex, a region previously found to distinguish between literal and figurative processing, was activated at the same time as well.
This suggests that literal and figurative meanings are processed in parallel to some extent, which gives support to the configurational hypothesis.
