Abstract
In this chapter, we survey what is currently known about bilingual idiom processing and present data from a study that investigates three questions about the comprehension of idioms in English-French bilinguals. First, do the linguistic factors that control monolingual idiom comprehension (e.g., familiarity, literal plausibility, semantic decomposability; Libben & Titone, 2008) similarly control bilingual comprehension? Second, does an idiom’s cross-language similarity affect comprehension? Third, does native language status interact with idiom processing in these respects? To address these questions, we conducted a comprehension study where English-French bilinguals read English sentences that included idioms from a prior normative first-language study that were further coded for their similarity to idioms in French. We also manipulated whether the idiom-final word was presented in English (intact condition) or French (code-switched condition). The results suggest that bilinguals are sensitive to the same linguistic factors that control idiom processing for monolinguals (i.e., familiarity) and that previous work suggesting an increased role for semantic decomposability (Abel, 2003) may actually be due to cross-language overlap. The implications for bilingual lexical representation and processing are discussed.
Keywords: bilingualism, idiom processing, code-switching, figurative language processing, idiomatic expressions
When Joan Foster visited her Polish lover, Paul, she stumbled upon several English novels penned by an improbably named Mavis Quilp.