The Influence Of Familiar And Predictability On Chinese Idiom Comprehension

The cognition of language is the hot issue in cognitive psychology, the research for idioms has already been the focus of psychology. A large number of researches on English idioms have been done in the West and domestic researches in Chinese idioms are not so many. Based on previous researches, in this paper, we study the effect of Chinese idiomatic characteristics further.Three experiments were designed to investigate the effects of familiarity and predictability in idiom comprehension. In experiment 1, high familiar and less familiar idioms were presented in two types of sentences. The sentences were biased toward the idiom's literal meaning, biased toward the idiom's idioms meaning. Reading time for sentences containing less familiar idioms were longer than for sentences containing familiar idioms. Less familiar idioms required more reading time in idiomatic sentences than in literal sentences. And the familiarity by sentence type interaction was significant. In experiment 2 and 3, subjects saw high and low predicable idioms and made lexical decisions to idiom-related or literal-related targets presented at the idiom offset. Experiment 2 showed both high and low predictable idioms showed priming of the idiom-related meaning. Experiment 3 showed more priming for high predictable idioms than for low predictable idioms when the target was presented prior to idiom offset.The results prove that familiar and predictability affect Chinese idioms comprehension, context facilitate subjects understand idioms. In addition, idioms were represented in mental lexicon as modes, and the comprehension of Chinese idiom was a compositional process.