ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the major theories concerning L1 idiom comprehension. Besides the five major idiom processing models, there are two other interesting hypotheses concerning idiom comprehension that deserve scrutiny in this chapter: the "syntactic and semantic disassociation" theory and the "idiom key" concept and its role in idiom comprehension. Put forward by Swinney and Cutler, the simultaneous processing, or lexical representation idiom processing model postulates that idioms reside in the mental lexicon as long words side by side with all the other ordinary words—that is, there is not a separate list of idioms as suggested by the literal first hypothesis. Introduced by Gibbs, the figurative first, or direct access, model is a radical extension of the lexical representation or simultaneous processing hypothesis. It asserts that native speakers rarely attempt literal comprehension of an idiom because they can often recognize an idiom when seeing one, and therefore they access its idiomatic meaning directly, completely bypassing linguistic processing.
