On the Psycholinguistic Activation of Idioms’ Parts

Abstract

This article examines the psycholinguistic "activation" of idioms and their constituent parts. It considers whether idioms are activated as units or whether and to what extent they psycholinguistically "activate" or "prime" the mental lexical entries for each individual word within the individual. This is an imporatant question because the unique characteristic of idioms that often, the meaning of the idiom taken as a synthetic whole has little or nothing to do with the meanings of its ingredient parts.