The role of syntactic competence in idiom comprehension: A study on aphasic patients

Opaque idiom comprehension was assessed by means of a verbal string-to-picture matching task in 11 aphasic patients with normal semantic memory, but with a variable degree of syntactic impairment. Patients were also submitted to a grammaticality judgment of both idioms and literal sentences. Idiom comprehension was impaired, with a bias toward the literal interpretation. Performance on idioms correlated with performance in the literal sentence comprehension, with implausibility of the literal interpretation, with syntactic competence, and in particular with the patients' ability to recognise whether idioms were presented in their syntactically correct form or not. On the other hand, there was no difference in performance between ill-formed and well-formed idioms and between frozen and unfrozen ones. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.