Abstract
This study examined the impact that metaphorical pictures and semantic transparency had on meaning recall of English idioms for L2 learners. Twenty-seven idioms of differing semantic transparency (low, mid, and high) were selected and two types of pictures were drawn for each idiom. One picture type was a literal only representation while the other was a literal+figurative representation. These idioms and picture conditions (no picture, literal only, and literal+figurative) were counterbalanced and presented to student participants (n=64) via a PowerPoint input treatment. The delayed posttests measured meaning recall of the idioms’ L1 paraphrased meaning. The data showed that in absolute terms, literal-figurative pictures promoted better retention of meaning at all levels of transparency, but this finding was most robust for high-transparency idioms. However, a number of pictures, especially those with metonymical elements, led to overspecification, which has wider implications for pictorial input in general.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jeannette Littlemore, who gave me invaluable advice in the preparation and design of this study, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to Yu Tamura for introducing me to generalized linear mixed-effects models and for being such a tremendous help in applying them to my data.
Appendix 1 Treatment Pictures
High-Transparency Idioms
Mid-Transparency Idioms
Low-Transparency Idioms
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2018-0336).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- A double-edged sword: Metaphor and metonymy through pictures for learning idioms
- The functional roles of lexical devices in second language learners’ encoding of temporality: A study of Mandarin Chinese-speaking ESL learners
- The same cloze for all occasions?
- The effect of written text on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language: A replication study
- Cut-offs and co-occurring gestures: Similarities between speakers’ first and second languages
- Bilingual patterns of path encoding: A study of Polish L1-German L2 and Polish L1-Spanish L2 speakers
- Concordancing in writing pedagogy and CAF measures of writing
- D-linked and non-d-linked wh-questions in L2 French and L3 English
- Effects of pragmatic instruction on EFL teenagers’ apologetic email writing: Comprehension, production, and cognitive processes
- Music training and the use of songs or rhythm: Do they help for lexical stress processing?
- Second language processing of English past tense morphology: The role of working memory
- Recasts versus clarification requests: The relevance of linguistic target, proficiency, and communicative ability
- The role of self-construal in EFL vocabulary learning
- The cross-sectional development of verb–noun collocations as constructions in L2 writing