Dropping beans or spilling secrets: How idiomatic context bias affects prediction
Publication year
2022Number of pages
15 p.
Source
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34, 2, (2022), pp. 209-223ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
PI Group Neurobiology of Language
Toegepaste Taalwetenschap
SW OZ DCC PL
Medical Psychology
SW OZ DCC NRP
Journal title
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume
vol. 34
Issue
iss. 2
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 209
Page end
p. 223
Subject
110 000 Neurocognition of Language; All institutes and research themes of the Radboud University Medical Center; Cognitive and developmental aspects of Multilingualism; Language & Communication; Neuropsychology and rehabilitation psychology; Psycholinguistics; Radboudumc 7: Neurodevelopmental disorders DCMN: Donders Center for Medical Neuroscience; Neuro- en revalidatiepsychologieAbstract
Idioms can have both a literal interpretation and a figurative interpretation (e.g., to "kick the bucket"). Which interpretation should be activated can be disambiguated by a preceding context (e.g., "The old man was sick. He kicked the bucket."). We investigated whether the idiomatic and literal uses of idioms have different predictive properties when the idiom has been biased toward a literal or figurative sentence interpretation. EEG was recorded as participants performed a lexical decision task on idiom-final words in biased idioms and literal (compositional) sentences. Targets in idioms were identified faster in both figuratively and literally used idioms than in compositional sentences. Time-frequency analysis of a prestimulus interval revealed relatively more alpha-beta power decreases in literally than figuratively used idiomatic sequences and compositional sentences. We argue that lexico-semantic retrieval plays a larger role in literally than figuratively biased idioms, as retrieval of the word meaning is less relevant in the latter and the word form has to be matched to a template. The results are interpreted in terms of context integration and word retrieval and have implications for models of language processing and predictive processing in general.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [227437]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3564]
- Electronic publications [107154]
- Faculty of Arts [28543]
- Faculty of Medical Sciences [86157]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [28417]
- Open Access publications [76289]
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