THE RELEVANCE OF CONTEXT IN UNFAMILIAR L2 IDIOM COMPREHENSION

Abstract

The present study investigates to what extent the effect of context is responsible in facilitating L2 idiom comprehension. Forty students of Italian as a foreign language (L1 Croatian) completed comprehension tests consisting of unfamiliar L2 Italian metaphorical idioms, first presented with only general context and then with a specific context. To date, a large number of studies have described and analysed factors that influence the recognition and comprehension of idioms in one’s native language, and in the last twenty years the same topic has also been investigated for L2 idiom comprehension. However, many of these studies differ in terms of methodology (eye-tracking, control L1 groups, comprehension tests), the aim of the study, and ultimately, the corpus of the study (processing literal vs. metaphorical recognition, unfamiliar vs. familiar idioms, typology of idioms). Through a carefully designed questionnaire, in this study we exclude all possible factors that could influence idiom comprehension and isolate the context factor in the results. Given that in our previous research (2018) we collected highly unfamiliar Italian L2 opaque idioms and idioms without absolute and partial formal equivalents in Croatian, such as essere al verde, essere in gamba, and essere nato con la camicia, we can now psycholinguisticaly analyse to what extent the appropriate context can infer the correct comprehension of Italian L2 idioms.