A Study on the Representational Mechanism of Chinese Idioms: Evidence from the Priming Effect of English Verb-morpheme Equivalents

In order to investigate the underlying representational mechanism during the comprehension of Chinese three-character idioms, we designed two experiments to explore to what extent the English verb-morpheme equivalents facilitate the comprehension of Chinese idioms with high vs.low familiarity as well as with high vs.low decomposability by employing the cross-language non-masked priming paradigm within which lexical decision task was involved.The results showed that Chinese V+N idioms are represented in a mixed way:either verb-morphemes within the idioms or the idioms themselves can influence the representation.English verb-morpheme equivalents play a significant role in facilitating the comprehension of Chinese idioms with different semantic properties (familiarity and decomposability).The decomposability is also a factor related to the representation of Chinese idioms:those with high decomposability are represented as common phrases whereas those with low decomposability are represented as long words.Meanwhile, familiarity exerts influence on the representation of Chinese idioms with metaphorical meaning being accessed more easily when they were with high familiarity.