Measuring the impact of cross-cultural differences on learners' comprehension of imageable idioms

Abstract

Imageable idioms are figurative expressions that tend to call up a conventional scene in the native speaker's mind. However, do these imageable idioms call up the same scene in the language learner's mind? We report an experiment in which 78 French-speaking students were asked to 'guess' the meaning of unfamiliar English idioms, without the benefit of contextual clues. The results invite teachers and learners to approach the semantics of many imageable idioms as non-arbitrary, while giving due attention to obstacles to comprehension raised by both cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation. The article concludes with a set of guidelines to anticipate and remedy those comprehension problems. © 2001 Oxford University Press.