The Dominant Psycholinguistic Approaches on the Process of Idiom Comprehension

Idiomatic expressions are defined as linguistic structures, which, in contrast with ordinary sentences, can not be interpreted via meaning amalgamation of their constituents. This study aims at surveying the most important psycholinguistic models proposed in the study of idiom comprehension. Furthermore, the significant characteristics of these approaches have been discussed. The common feature of the traditional approaches is their emphasis on the literal meaning processing, that is, these approaches are either adherents of serial meaning processing, i.e., they would assert that literal meaning processing takes place before figurative meaning processing, or they are interested on the parallel meaning processing. However, the common ground of the novel approaches is that they emphasize on the important role of the contextual features in accelerating idiom comprehension. At the end, the notable graded salience hypothesis has been criticized, and the possibility of posing a unified theoretical framework in idiom comprehension has been investigated.