The Role of Mental Imagery in Understanding Unknown Idioms

In studies of the cognitive processing of idioms, the role of mental imagery in understanding idioms remains a controversial issue. Cacciari and Glucksberg (1995) conducted an experimental study to investigate whether generating mental images of idioms can facilitate their comprehension. Their results appeared to reject both the possible connection between the literal mental image of an idiom and the figurative meaning of the idiom, and the facilitatory effect of mental imagery on comprehension. Our study aims at exploring the facilitatory role of mental images in understanding unknown idioms. We used a paraphrase verification task for transparent and opaque unknown idioms translated from foreign languages into Bulgarian. The results demonstrate that literal mental images of transparent unknown idioms can facilitate their comprehension in terms of error scores in a simple paraphrase verification task. No facilitation effect for opaque unknown idioms was obtained. This points towards a link between the literal mental images of transparent idioms and their figurative meanings.