Psycholinguistische und elektrophysiologische Literatur
Start with the search…
I was surfing around the internet looking for some kind of surrealistic inspiration for memes. Some random object would do. A search for “toothpaste tubes” or “people who live inside toothpaste tubes” combined with “a random string of words” or “automatic meaningless phrases that people say without knowing why”.
Result number one…
The first thing I found was this hilarious image by Chris (Simpsons Artist).
"How to cheer up a miserable friend: hide inside your friends toothpaste tube to give them a mysterious minty fresh surprise" - Chris (Simpsons artist)
No matter what you search for on the internet, something crazy is going to show up. The internet is filled with undiscovered comics. Picture searches are a great way to survive the pandemic isolation. I wonder if my neighbors can hear me laughing late at night while being alone at home. The drawings of Chris (Simpsons artist) are fantastic. I don’t know if they are bizarre, crude, ironic, disgusting, or just plain funny. Some of them I didn’t even want to look at, yet I did and now I can’t un-see them. The drawing that totally fit to my search term was this one of a women living in a toothpaste tube. Did you know that little blue women live in your Alexa too?
To see more drawings, visit the twitter account: getbentsaggy
Result number two…
This search result focused more on the “string of words” or “things people say, but they don’t know why” queries. The result is not funny. The words “gay, stupid, ugly, dumb, freak, retarded, jerk, lame” all lined up and pouring out of a toothpaste tube. It’s a clever image and gets the point across well. Once you say something, you can’t get it back into the tube.
The search didn’t really satisfy me. Therefore, I followed the picture back to the publisher’s website. The image came from ResearchGate.net. The site hosts a database containing a large amount of searchable research papers. My search for “String of Words” returned the result, “Processing multiword idiomatic strings”. The abstract is difficult to understand if it is just scanned over. It is filled with fun terms, like “semantic memory” and “electrophysiological literature” and “the behavior of idioms”. If I were going to read the article in its entirely, which I could because it is published for free, I would not be able to do it on a tiny cell phone. I would need to use the tablet and the stylus. Note taking is mandatory.
Idioms are strings of words whose figurative meaning does not necessarily derive from that of the constituent parts.
- figurative meaning – übertragene Bedeutung
- constituent parts – Bestandteile
They belong to the vast and heterogeneous realm of multiword expressions, i.e. literal and non-literal word clusters whose representations are stored in semantic memory.
- heterogeneous realm – heterogenes Reich
- non-literal word clusters – wörtliche und nicht wörtliche Wortcluster
- semantic memory – semantisches Gedächtnis
This article provides an updated review of the psycholinguistic and electrophysiological literature on the processes underlying idiom comprehension with specific reference to the cues that lead to idiom recognition, to the syntactic and semantic behavior of idioms, to the relationships between literal compositionality and idiomatic meaning retrieval.
- psycholinguistic – psycholinguistisch
- electrophysiological – elektrophysiologisch
- idiom comprehension – Verständnis der Redewendung
- specific references – spezifische Referenzen
- idiom recognition – Anerkennung der Redewendung
- syntactic – syntaktisch
- semantic – semantisch
- behavior of idioms – Verhalten von Redewendungen
- literal compositionality – wörtliche Komposition
- idiomatic meaning retrieval – idiomatische Bedeutungsabfrage
Behavioral models of idiom comprehension are presented and discussed also with respect to the electrophysiological correlates of idiom and figurative language comprehension.
- Behavioral models – Verhaltensmodelle
- idiom comprehension – Verständnis der Redewendung
- language comprehension – Sprachverständnis
Cacciari, Cristina. (2014). Processing multiword idiomatic strings, Many words in one?. The Mental Lexicon. 9. 267-293. 10.1075/ml.9.2.05cac.