The role of idiom length and context in spoken idiom comprehension

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).