Less Direct, More Analytical: Eye-Movement Measures of L2 Idiom Reading

Idioms (e.g., break the ice, spill the beans) are ubiquitous multiword units that are often semantically non-compositional. Psycholinguistic data suggests that L1 readers process idioms in a hybrid fashion, with early comprehension facilitated by direct retrieval, and later comprehension inhibited by factors promoting compositional parsing (e.g., semantic decomposability). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the role of direct retrieval and compositional analysis when idioms are read naturally in sentences in an L2. Thus, French–English bilingual adults with French as their L1 were tested using English sentences. For idioms in canonical form, Experiment 1 showed that prospective verb-related decomposability and retrospective noun-related decomposability guided L2 readers towards bottom-up figurative meaning access over different time courses. Direct retrieval played a lesser role, and was mediated by the availability of a congruent “cognate” idiom in the readers’ L1. Next, Experiment 2 included idioms where direct retrieval was disrupted by a phrase-final language switch into French (e.g., break the glace, spill the fèves). Switched idioms were read comparably to switched literal phrases at early stages, but were penalized at later stages. These results collectively suggest that L2 idiom processing is mostly compositional, with direct retrieval playing a lesser role in figurative meaning comprehension.