ABSTRACT
An idiom is an expression whose overall figurative meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of its parts. For instance, the figurative meaning ‘die’ of the idiom kick the bucket cannot be computed from the literal meaning of the words kick, the, and bucket, in the same way that the literal meaning of kick the pail can be computed from the meanings of the individual words. Idioms seem to be noncompositional. This observation suggests that idioms cannot be processed in the same way as expressions that have only literal readings. This suggestion is supported by the finding in various reaction time experiments that idioms are processed faster than literal expressions (Estill & Kemper (1982); Gibbs (1980); Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, & Antos (1978); Swinney & Cutler (1979); Van de Voort (1988); Vonk & Van de Voort (1989)). One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that an idiom is stored in the mental lexicon as one long word. After all, simply retrieving the meaning of a whole phrase is much faster than accessing the literal meaning of individual words and subsequently computing a literal meaning of that phrase.
