惯用语理解的多种心理机制：不同的证据

惯用语的理解机制一直是心理语言学研究的热点问题。来自语言学和神经生理学的证据都表明，对惯用语的加工存在多样化趋势，而且加工策略和手段会随个体卷入社会生活的程度而变化。惯用语的加工受加工者自身的隐喻知识以及惯用语本身性质的影响。另外，惯用语加工激活的脑区表明句法和语义分析在惯用语理解中均发挥重要作用，惯用语并没有词汇化，但是不能使用统一的加工模型来整合惯用语的理解机制。惯用语自身性质的多样化导致惯用语理解的多种心理机制。

Diverse Mental Mechanisms of Idiom Comprehension:Different Proofs

It was argued for a long time how people comprehend idioms.Early accounts of idiom comprehension proposed a word-like representation of idioms in the mental lexicon,suggesting that the single words that make up the phrase and the semantic and syntactic information they contain do not play a role for the idiom as a unit.However,several observations argue against such a representation.There is correct stress assignment in idioms and many of them show syntactic flexibility.More proofs from linguistics showed different aspects in idiom processing comprehension:some researchers have argued that the processing begins from a strictly bottom-up way,in the sense that initial syntactic decisions cannot be influenced by higher-level semantic consideration.Noncompositional models assume that an idiomatic expression is identified like a lexical entity stored in memory.Contrary to the noncompositional models,compositional models assume that idiomatic meaning is not encoded as a separate lexical entry but as a meaning that is associated either with a particular configuration of words or with preexisting conceptual metaphors.Consistent with the compositional hypothesis,a growing body of literature supports the assumption that a strict semantic dichotomy between literal and figurative meanings is inadequate to account for idiom processing.Other researchers,however,have envisioned a quite different system,in which syntactic and semantic processors are highly independent.The agreement have been reached later as idioms are both unitary and compositional,although at their different levels of cognitive representation.They have a unitary idiomatic concept that points to individual lemmas.These lemmas together constitute the idiom,but they are not bound exclusively to an idiomatic meaning.Proofs from neuropsychology explained it in another way.Since the specific role of the two cerebral hemispheres in processing idiomatic language is highly debated,some studies show the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus(LIFG),while other data support the crucial role of right-hemispheric regions,and particularly of the middle/superior temporal area.The research findings indicate the bilateral involvement of both hemispheres in idiom comprehension.There is direct access to the idiomatic meaning of figurative language,not dependent on the suppression of its literal meaning,for which the LIFG was previously thought to be responsible.