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In a previous study, we verified the advantages of learning a set of idiomatic phrases in Spanish through two didactic proposals based on Cognitive Linguistics in which the participants reflected on the connection between the idioms’ literal reading and the idiomatic meaning retroactively (after receiving the meaning) or proactively (before discovering it) (Ureña Tormo et al., 2022). This paper focuses on the incorrect responses of the previous study and identifies four types of errors: a) interference with the meaning of another target idiom; b) literal meaning; c) meaning unrelated to the idiom; d) blank response. Among these, blank responses (d) predominate significantly, especially one week after learning the idioms, while confusion between phrases (a) decreases markedly over time. The results do not allow us to establish whether either of the two methodological proposals is more likely to cause or avoid a certain type of error. However, given that the pedagogical treatment based on reflecting on the literal-figurative link retroactively reports superior results, it is convenient to continue exploring its pedagogical potential, and to relate this to idioms with specific features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]