ABSTRACT
The study of the identification and comprehension of ambiguous idiomatic strings, like kick the bucket, shares many of the issues that are involved in the study of lexical ambiguity, and as such is important for understanding the pro cesses involved in sentence comprehension. Ambiguous idioms in fact can be assigned either a literal interpretation, based on the compositional meanings of its constituents, or a figurative meaning, which has been learned and associated with the whole string. Some of the crucial questions that have been asked in the study both of ambiguous words, and of ambiguous idioms, concern problems like the following: Is there an automatic exhaustive activation of meanings or a context-dependent preactivation? At which point in time does activation of each meaning occur? Is selection of the appropriate meaning immediate or delayed?
