Such norms are available in English (Cronk, Lima, & Schweigert, 1993 Libben & Titone, 2008 Titone & Connine, 1994b) and in Italian (Tabossi et al., 2011). However, as of yet, only a few studies have been specifically dedicated to the collection of norms for idiomatic expressions. The neural correlates of idiom processing have also been investigated (e.g., Hillert & Buracas, 2009). In psycholinguistics, a number of studies have attempted to investigate how idiomatic expressions are processed in different populations, such as healthy adults, patients (e.g., Hillert, 2004 Papagno & Caporali, 2007), or children (e.g., Caillies & Le Sourn-Bissaoui, 2008 Levorato, Nesi, & Cacciari, 2004), as well as in different tasks, such as comprehension (e.g., Caillies & Butcher, 2007 Caillies & Declercq, 2011) and production (e.g., Conner et al., 2011 Sprenger et al., 2006). As a result, they cannot be easily translated from one language to another, since different expressions are used to represent the same idea, such as the English “raining cats and dogs,” for the idea that it is raining a lot, and the corresponding expression in French pleuvoir comme vache qui pisse, which literally translates as “raining like a pissing cow.” When learning a second language, speakers often face difficulties in mastering these expressions properly (Tabossi et al., 2009). In effect, such utterances are not created by the speakers themselves, since both the meaning and form of these utterances are standardized, often allowing for only minimal variation. Idioms are preformatted utterances, a special kind of fixed expression (other types of fixed expressions are phrasal verbs, restricted collocations, and sayings and proverbs) that belong to the conventional repertoire of native speakers of a given language (Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006). These verbal expressions are often used in everyday conversation without apparent effort (Tabossi et al., 2008) and are also quickly recognized because they are well-known expressions (Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2009).

Idiomatic expressions exist in all languages and are very common (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988)-in particular, in colloquial language (Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2008). The new set of norms should facilitate research on idiom processing and may lead to new insights into how people represent and process idioms.

The second goal (and the novel aspect of our approach) was therefore to collect comprehension times for these expressions and to gain an understanding of the relationships between the various dimensions of idioms and their online processing. Although Caillies ( 2009) reported norms for 300 expressions (only 35 of which were also used in the present study), she did not collect online measures of the processing of idioms. Unlike in the case of other types of stimuli (pictures, isolated words), norms for idiomatic expressions in French are very rare. The first was to collect norms for French idiomatic expressions in order to increase the pool of French norms available for this type of item. For instance the French idomatic expression casser sa pipe (“to kick the bucket”) means “to die,” and thus its global meaning is far from the meaning of its components, which, taken separately, literally mean “to break ( casser) his/her ( sa) pipe ( pipe).” In the present research, we pursued two main goals. An idiomatic expression comprises several words whose overall meaning (figurative meaning) is in some way different from the meanings of its constituent parts, or in other words, the meaning of a given expression is not a direct function of its components (Tabossi, Arduino, & Fanari, 2011). However, this is less frequently the case for longer linguistic items such as phrases, sentences, and idiomatic expressions. A large number of psycholinguistic norms are available for individual pictures (of objects or of actions) and their names (for recent studies, see, e.g., Janssen, Pajtas, & Caramazza, 2011 Tsaparina, Bonin, & Méot, 2011).

4 pics 1 word 5 letters level 1271