Are Figurative Interpretations of Idioms Directly Retrieved, Compositionally Built, or Both? Evidence from Eye Movement Measures of Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Idioms are part of a general class of multiword expressions where the overall interpretation cannot befully determined through a simple syntactic and semantic (i.e., compositional) analysis of theircomponent words (e.g., kick the bucket, save your skin). Idioms are thus simultaneously amenable todirect retrieval from memory, and to an on-demand compositional analysis, yet it is unclear whichprocesses lead to figurative interpretations of idioms during comprehension. In this eye-tracking study,healthy adults read sentences in their native language that contained idioms, which were followed byfigurative- or literal-biased disambiguating sentential information. The results showed that the earlieststages of comprehension are driven by direct retrieval of idiomatic forms, however, later stages ofcomprehension, after which point the intended meaning of an idiom is known, are driven by both directretrieval and compositional processing. Of note, at later stages, increased idiom decomposabilityslowed reading time, suggesting more effortful figurative comprehension. Together, these results aremost consistent with multi-determined or hybrid models of idiom processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".