Representation and processing of idioms: evidence from aphasia

Idiomatic expressions are often considered 'automatic speech' that need not be syntactically or morphologically parsed. However, there is a great structural variation within idioms, which could imply that not all idioms are processed alike. In the present case study with a deep dyslexic patient we compare reading of Finnish verb phrase idioms and noun phrase idioms. On the basis of the present experiments, we conclude that noun phrase idioms are processed more holistically than verb phrase idioms. Moreover, it seems that in verb phrase idioms, processing of inflected complement nouns is context-sensitive: our patient showed improved performance on these items as long as they were primed with sentence context (be it semantically adequate or not). This suggests that idiomatic inflected nouns may be stored as parts of their syntactic constructions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.