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We investigated the relationships between integration of the literal meaning of the idiom words and activation of the idiomatic meaning using self-paced reading times. Participants read short stories in which predictable and unpredictable ambiguous idioms were followed by literal or idiomatic sentences disambiguating the contextually appropriate interpretation. Literal sentences were read faster when preceded by unpredictable idioms than by predictable idioms, and faster than idiomatic sentences when preceded by unpredictable idioms. Idiomatic sentences were read faster than literal sentences when preceded by predictable idioms confirming that predictable idioms were resolved idiomatically earlier on than unpredictable idioms. Idiomatic sentences were read equally fast no matter whether they were preceded by predictable or unpredictable idioms suggesting that the idiomatic meaning was available in both cases. Overall the results showed interplay between literal compositional processes and idiomatic meaning retrieval modulated by the point at which the idiomatic meaning became available.

This ERP study employed an N2pc paradigm to investigate possible functional interactions between mechanisms of visual spatial attention and grammatical gender processing. Previous studies showed that the N2pc, an attention-related ERP component, can be modulated by lexical-semantic variables. However, it remains to be seen whether the N2pc can be affected by grammatical features as well. To test this, we conducted an N2pc study with Italian word pairs whose grammatical gender either agreed or disagreed. Participants read a centrally presented noun followed by an adjective in a lateralized position during a gender agreement task. Between 170 and 310ms, the N2pc was elicited contralaterally to the adjective position with a left-lateralized effect of the agreement manipulation. These results suggest that this component could be influenced by grammatical features, supporting a functional interaction between processes mediating visual spatial attention and agreement computation.

The aim of this self-paced reading study was to investigate the role of grammatical and context-based gender in assigning an antecedent to a pronoun where the antecedent is an epicene or a bigender noun. In Italian, epicene nouns (e.g., vittima, victim) have grammatical gender, whereas bigender nouns (e.g., assistente, assistant) do not have grammatical gender but instead acquire it from the context in which they occur. We devised three different types of context: incongruent contexts (i.e., contexts containing a gender bias that differed from the grammatical gender of the epicene), congruent contexts (i.e., contexts where the gender bias and grammatical gender coincided), and neutral contexts. In the case of epicenes, pronoun resolution was driven by grammatical gender; in the case of bigenders it was driven by the gender assigned by context. The results are discussed in the light of current models of anaphor resolution.

Two cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigated the role of the length of the idiom string (Experiment 1) and of prior sentential context (Experiment 2) in spoken idiom recognition. The idiomatic meaning was activated at the offset of long idioms but not of short idioms when the idiom was preceded by a neutral context. The idiomatic meaning of short idioms was instead activated at the string offset when the idiom was preceded by an idiomatic context. The results support the Configuration Hypothesis (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988).

In two crossmodal lexical decision experiments we investigated the time course of idiomatic meaning activation for Italian participants listening to spoken idioms. Participants were grouped into fast and slow groups on the basis of their speed of correct response to visually presented targets associated with idioms that were auditorily presented. Participants whose mean lexical decision times were below the 45th percentile were considered slow participants and those whose mean lexical decision times were above the 55th percentile were considered fast participants. The results of Experiment 1 showed that slow and fast participants decided equally quickly the lexical status of the target words associated with predictable idioms. In contrast, whereas the slow participants responded to target words presented during predictable idioms more quickly than to target words presented during nonpredictable idioms, the fast participants responded equally quickly to targets presented during predictable and nonpredictable idioms. When a response deadline was introduced (Experiment 2), fast and slow participants activated the idiomatic meaning of nonpredictable idioms equally quickly, as reflected by the lexical decision times for the target words associated with idioms of this type. The results are interpreted in the light of current models of spoken idiom comprehension.

The aim of the present study was to investigate children's ability to complete idiom fragments embedded in stories. Previous studies found that children's and preadolescents' ability to comprehend a text was related to their ability to understand an idiomatic expression (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2005; Levorato, Nesi, & Cacciari, 2004; Nippold, Moran, & Schwarz, 2001). Comprehension and production processes share a vast amount of conceptual and lexical knowledge. Hence, we hypothesized that children's text reading comprehension skills also might be related to their ability to produce nonliteral completions. Skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders (age range from 7.4 to 10.3) were presented with short stories that ended with an idiomatic fragment (e.g., “Paul broke the .. .” for the idiom “break the ice”) and were asked to complete the story. The children's completions were coded as Literal, Idiomatic, or Figurative, as in previous studies (Levorato & Cacciari, 1992, 1995). The results showed that children's ability to understand a text was related to their ability to complete idiomatic fragments figuratively. Less-skilled comprehenders provided more literal completions than skilled comprehenders who, in turn, provided more idiomatic completions.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the semantic dimensions that contribute to the mental representation of vision verbs in Italian. In Experiment 1, a group of experts (psychology faculty members) was asked to list the semantic attributes necessary for describing a set of Italian vision verbs (Phase 1) and a group of students rated the extent to which each of these attributes was appropriate to characterise these verbs (Phase 2). In Experiment 2, the conceptual organisation of vision verbs was assessed through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) using direct judgements of pairwise similarity between vision verbs (e.g., “vedere-guardare”). The results show that six of the attributes generated in Phase 1 are useful for describing the pattern of similarity ratings obtained in Experiment 2, namely attention, certainty, cognitive content, control, duration, and intentionality.

Gibbs and O'Brien (1990) recently claimed that the images that people associate with everyday idioms reflect the deep conceptual metaphors that underlie the meanings of those idioms. However, because idiomatic strings can convey both a literal and an idiomatic meaning, people must be able to inhibit or ignore literal meanings if they are to produce mental images that uniquely reflect idiomatic meanings. We investigated the potential interference between literal and idiomatic meanings in three experiments. Experiment 1 used a mental-image production task similar to that used by Gibbs and O'Brien. Counter to Gibbs and O'Brien's claim, the images that we obtained referred overwhelmingly to the literal meanings of idiomatic strings rather than to their idiomatic meanings. Experiments 2 and 3 employed a paraphrase verification task to examine the effects of mental imagery on idiom comprehension. If the images associated with an idiom reflect that idiom's meaning, then imagery should facilitate comprehension. No evidence for facilitation was found in either experiment. Instead, imagery interfered with comprehension, as assessed by paraphrase verification time, both for idiomatic meanings and for literal, concrete meanings. We conclude that the images associated with idioms do not reflect idiom meanings.

There is an association between number or letter perception and response preference with faster left-hand responses for small numbers and faster right-hand responses for large numbers. Involuntary shifts of attention to the left or right visual field were shown to occur when stimuli with a strong meaning appear in the visual field. We investigated whether perceiving letters of the alphabet can induce such a shift of attention. The results suggest that the spatial component of letters might not be as strong as that of the numbers, and it probably takes longer for letter perception to induce shifts of attention.