Cutting the mustard: an experimental investigation of idiomatic expressions in the lexicon

We report the results of three distinct experimental investigations designed to address these questions. The results of our experiments suggest that idiomatic expressions are represented as structural frames in the lexicon and are sensitive to syntactic context during on-line processing (Exp 3a, 3b) and that idiomatic expressions, such as kick the bucket, are lexically related to their literal components kick and bucket such that access to the idiomatic representation is mediated by activation of its literal pieces (Exp, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b).

Additionally, we present evidence that some degree of literal processing of idiomatic expressions is obligatory (Exp 1, 2, 4a, 4b) even in semantic contexts that strongly disfavor the literal interpretation of these strings. We present our results as they apply to models of idiom representation and processing.