Cross-language activation of figurative meanings of translated L1 idioms in L2 reading: An eye-tracking study

Abstract Cross-language figurative meaning activation in idiom processing has been observed in primed lexical and semantic decision tasks, but not in text reading. To study first-language figurative idiom meaning activation in second-language reading, we created and tested a novel contextual idiom-priming paradigm and conducted an eye-tracking experiment with Chinese–English immersion and non-immersion bilinguals, and English-speaking controls. Three counterbalanced conditions were created: in English texts, the meaning probe was preceded by a close or paraphrased translation of a related Chinese-only idiom, or an unrelated phrase. The processing of the probe was influenced by figurative meanings of Chinese-only idioms for both groups of bilinguals, but not for monolingual controls, evidencing non-selective language processing beyond single words. There was no difference in the patterns of activation between close and paraphrased translations, suggesting that exact lexical overlap may not be necessary for cross-language activation of idioms. Different processing patterns were observed for immersion and non-immersion bilinguals.