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  • Published: 17 October 2019

A thematic corpus-based study of idioms in the Corpus of Contemporary American English

  • Elaheh Rafatbakhsh 1 &
  • Alireza Ahmadi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8327-2420 1  

Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education volume  4 , Article number:  11 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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The traditional approach to presenting idioms relies mainly on teachers’ or materials writers’ judgement, one-by-one and quite incidentally; and the existing teaching materials and references for idioms are mostly intuition-based. However, a more recent approach to better teaching and learning idioms is to present them under categories of their common themes and topics. Corpus linguistics can be of much contribution through helping the design and development of more authentic and systematic materials using comprehensive corpora which are typically the best representatives of the target language. In this connection, the present study aimed at searching for the thematic index of 1506 idioms under 81 categories at the end of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms in the largest freely available corpus, i.e. the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), composed of more than 520 million words. To this end, we used a manuscript in PHP written by a professional computer programmer especially for this purpose. The findings yielded a list of idioms sorted based on their frequencies under their theme-based categories. To focus on the more frequently-used idioms of various themes in real contexts, materials designers, teachers, and learners of English can benefit from this idiom list in textbooks and classroom activities.

Introduction

An idiom is defined as a “constituent or series of constituents for which the semantic interpretation is not a compositional function of the formatives of which it is composed” (Fraser, 1970 ; p.22). Idiomaticity is a topic of some research and studies in the areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and neuropsychology (Cacciari, 1993 ). “The importance of idioms in any language cannot be doubted. Their ubiquity makes them anything but a marginal phenomenon, and surely a linguistic theory has an obligation to explain them in a natural way” (Chafe, 1968 ; p.111).

It is believed that the more words a learner knows, the more proficient they are in the process of language learning (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004 ; Nation & Meara, 2002 ). This assumption does not take the different combinatory possibilities of words into consideration (Daskalovska, 2011 ). A successful language learning mastery includes a crucial component of learning formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and compounds (Wray, 2000 ). Idioms provide the language with variety and imagination (Cooper, 1999 ) and their learning embodies learning a culture (Crystal, 1997 ; Glucksberg & McGlone, 2001 ; Ovando & Collier, 1985 ). Learning idioms can lead to native-like proficiency since idioms are learned in chunks, and consequently, they are retrieved from the learners’ memory without hesitations which can lead to fluency (Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers, & Demecheleer, 2006 ; Cain, Towse, & Knight, 2009 ; Lim, Ang, Lee, & Leong, 2009 ; Teodorescu, 2015 ). On the other hand, when language learners learn the words individually, they may need more time to retrieve them and make proper sentences. Translators or language teachers cannot afford to ignore idioms or idiomaticity if their aim is natural use of language (Fernando, 1996 ).

Furthermore, idioms are considered to be a particular kind of lexical items. Lexical items are “socially sanctioned independent units”. Language is not individually defined; it is rather a social phenomenon. Lewis ( 1993 ) emphasized the importance of “lexical approach” in language teaching and learning. According to this approach, although language can be sub-divided into sentences, turns, morphemes and phonemes, “lexical items” can be considered as the minimal units for certain syntactic purposes. Larger sequences are too large for analyses and shorter ones are too short. The multiword units can be analyzed but researchers (Lewis, 1993 ; Nattinger, 1988 ) believe that these units should be perceived as single, unanalyzed wholes which is in turn quite important in the process of language teaching and learning.

Although figurative expressions may appear quite arbitrary, there exist certain structures and organizations among them and a large number of these expressions have common metaphoric themes (Kovecses & Szabco, 1996 ). For example, there is a wide range of idioms related to themes of nature, animals, body parts, sports, specific names, food, colors, and all the senses which are used to describe personality, appearance, work, health issues, and many more (O’Dell & McCarthy, 2010 ). Moreover, idiomatic expressions often indicate and reflect social norms, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions (Glucksberg & McGlone, 2001 ). There is a taxonomy that suggests classifying teaching approaches into two broad categories of non-semantic (Szczepaniak, 2006 ; Tran, 2013 ; Vrbinc & Vrbinc, 2011 ) and semantic approaches (Boers & Stengers, 2008 ; Panou, 2014 ). In the non-semantic approaches, the idioms are provided for the learners one-by-one and quite incidentally through the materials, while in the semantic approaches, the idioms are presented by their shared meanings or themes. Therefore, the semantic approaches, which are based on classification of idioms according to metaphors, their source domains and origins can enhance idiom learning and deeper retention (Boers, 2013 ).

As a large number of idioms are not intelligible to learners at first sight and their meanings typically cannot be guessed through the analysis of the components, teaching and learning idioms have always been a problematic and challenging part of language. There are several drawbacks and limitations in the teaching textbooks concerning the choice of idioms as well as their presentation which have made their teaching and learning even more difficult (Cameron & Low, 1999 ; Simpson & Mendis, 2003 ). Therefore, there is still a lot of room for more research and improvement on idioms in teaching methods and materials, particularly in EFL/ESL contexts. Applied and corpus linguistics can offer solutions to this problem by identifying frequencies and patterns of idiom use in order to give priorities in teaching and learning contexts (Liu, 2003 ).

Johansson ( 2009 ) has summarized the uses of corpora in language acquisition in the following figure (Fig  1 ).

figure 1

Johansson: Uses of corpora of relevance for language teaching

He argues that the corpus can be used in almost every aspect of language teaching and acquisition including materials development, testing, and so far.

Corpus search results and patterns can effectively replace teachers’ and material developers’ intuition when preparing the materials. A teacher can determine the level of importance of the materials for language teaching using corpus linguistics (Biber & Reppen, 2002 ). In this connection, the present corpus-based study aimed at identifying the frequencies of the idioms’ categories in the large Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) and reporting the most frequent ones for such purposes.

Literature review

Defining idioms.

Scholars have always had difficulty defining what an idiom is. Although there exist a lot of definitions, it is sometimes impossible to differentiate between collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms. In her dissertation, Grant ( 2003 ), after summarizing all the definitions of an idiom, came a conclusion that linguists have not reached a consensus on idiom definition and classification for language teachers and learners.

Fernando ( 1996 ) considers idioms as “conventionalized multi-word expressions often, but not always non-literal” (p. 1). Gramley and Pátzold ( 2003 ) have added more to that definition and define idiom as a “complex lexical item which is longer than a word form but shorter than a sentence and which has a meaning that cannot be derived from the knowledge of its component parts” (p. 55). Semantically speaking, scholars have proposed different scales or continuum of idiomaticity (Alexander, 1987 ; Cowie, Mackin, & McCaig, 1983 ; Fernando, 1996 ; Moon, 1998b ; Wood, 1981 ). Grant ( 2003 ) summarized the scales used by such scholars into six categories of a) semi-idioms including at least one word connected to its literal meaning (e.g. white lie), b) semi-opaque idioms whose meanings can be guessed but not easily (e.g. sail too close to the wind), c) pseudo idioms including an element that has no meaning on its own (e.g. spic and span), d) pure idioms, well-formed idioms, or idioms of decoding that have both literal and non-literal meaning (e.g. kick the bucket), e) full idioms which consist of constituents whose ordinary meanings are not related to the idioms’ semantic interpretations (e.g. butter up) and f) figurative idioms that have figurative meanings besides current literal interpretations (e.g. catch fire).

There are three themes repeated in all the definitions of idioms, compositionality, institutionalisation, and degree of frozenness or fixedness. First, the idioms are non-compositional since their meanings are not the sum of the meanings of their parts; secondly, they are institutionalised which means they are commonly used by a large number of people in a speech community; and finally, the idioms are frozen and fixed i.e. but the degree of their frozenness varies (Grant, 2003 ).

There is a blur line between idioms and other multiword units and since the mentioned characteristics might be common among them, it is difficult to differentiate between idioms and multiword units. This lack of unanimous agreement among scholars causes a lot of difficulties for teachers and learners on what an idiom is. Therefore, their only criterion for the choice of an idiom is dictionaries. However, the great number of existing idioms in the dictionaries is quite overwhelming and the attempts to prioritize them based on the categories and frequencies can be of great help in this respect.

Teaching and learning idioms

As mentioned earlier, formulaic language such as idioms should be taught in EFL contexts in order to increase the fluency and naturalness of leaners’ language. Teaching and learning idioms have a lot of advantages for learners such as promoting communicative competence, proficiency, fluency and familiarizing them with the target language culture (Bardovi-Harlig, 2002 ; Fernando, 1996 ; Liu, 2008 ; Moon, 1998a ; Schmitt, 2004 ; Thyab, 2016 ; Wood, 2002 ; Wray, 2000 ). Teaching and learning idioms are important and significant, since not only can lack of knowledge of idioms cause serious comprehension problems and misunderstandings in many contexts, even rich in clues, but also the use of idioms and figurative idioms in particular, is not as infrequent as it has been assumed (Boers, 2013 ). The results of an exploratory research (Maisa & Karunakaran, 2013 ) on the importance of teaching idioms to ESL students based on teachers’ perspectives showed that teachers believed teaching idioms to undergraduate students as an integral part of vocabulary teaching, lead to more fluent speaking and writing. As a result, they suggested the inclusion of idioms in dialogues, readings, and stories in the curriculum.

Boers ( 2000 ) carried out three experiments on figurative expressions in EFL contexts and all three studies involved two parallel groups of control and experimental. The participants of three studies were each 118, 73, and 74 intermediate learners of English respectively. In the first experiment, both groups were asked to read a text about emotions. Following that, the experimental group were given a list of expressions and vocabulary from the text, organized by their metaphoric themes while the control group received the same vocabulary but not in an organized way. The participants studied and discussed the expressions and subsequently took a cloze test based on the list of vocabularies and expressions. In the second experiment, the two groups received a list of vocabulary all on economic trends, however, unlike the control group, the experimental group had their list sorted based on the expressions’ source domains. To test the effectiveness of the experiment, they were asked to write an essay describing some graphs and the use of the mentioned expressions were examined and compared accordingly. Finally, in the third experiment, pupils were presented with a set of multiword verbs (prepositional and phrasal verbs). The experimental group received a list categorized by the headings of underlying orientational metaphors while the control group had the same list alphabetically. Following that, they all took a cloze test on the same topic. The result of all the three experiments indicated superior retention of the figurative expressions in experimental groups who received the lists sorted based on underlying metaphoric themes. That is because determining source domains lead to deep-level cognitive processing which in turn enhanced memory storage and learning.

Corpus-based studies on idioms

Although searching for idioms in corpora is a difficult and complex process due to the complex nature of the idioms, some studies have focused on searching the frequencies of idioms and their patterns of use in various corpora. For instance, Baddorf and Evens ( 1998 ) selected three corpora of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus (47,456,421 words), Dictionary of Old English (DOE) corpus (27,944,329 words), and the corpus of Gutenberg (41,588,806 words) and searched 30 idioms and their syntactic variants in these corpora using a computer program written for this purpose. They reported the idioms and their frequencies in details from the most to the least frequent.

Another main corpus-based study was carried out by Moon ( 1998b ) in which 6776 commonest British and American English Fixed Expressions including Idioms (FEI) in a premade database were searched for in the Oxford Hector Pilot Corpus (OHPC). The findings yielded information on overall frequencies and distributions; and explanations were provided on lexical and grammatical form, variation, ambiguity, polysemy, and metaphor, discoursal functions, evaluation and interactional perspectives, and cohesion in FEIs. Conclusions drawn from this study showed that further studies are required to create a more accurate image of the expressions. Furthermore, more revisions of existing models and descriptions should be made and the importance of the roles FEIs play in discourse should not be underrated.

Later, Liu ( 2003 ) in a study to identify pure semiliteral and literal idioms consulted four major contemporary English idiom dictionaries and three English phrasal verb dictionaries. Subsequently, he searched for such idioms in three contemporary spoken American English corpora, Corpus of Spoken, Professional American English, Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, and Spoken American Media English. The findings of the study suggested four lists of the most frequently used idioms and their patterns of use followed by recommendations for improving quality of teaching, materials and references in terms of idiom selection, meaning, explanation, and the examples. The researcher criticized teaching and including idioms in materials based on mere intuition.

In another corpus study of idioms by Simpson and Mendis ( 2003 ), the researchers selected the idioms based on three factors of compositeness or fixedness, institutionalization and semantic opacity. The corpus used was the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) consisting of 1.7 million words of academic discourse. The result suggested two idiom lists: The idioms particularly useful for English for academic purposes curricula and the idioms occurring four or more times in MICASE. Based on their findings, they recommended the use of corpus studies in teaching and learning idioms.

In a major corpus-based search of idioms, to prioritize teaching and learning idioms for ESL/EFL teachers and learners based on their frequencies of use in a corpus by Grant ( 2007 ), three groups of core idioms (non-compositional, non-figurative), figuratives (non-compositional, figurative), and ONCEs (one non-compositional element, may also be figurative) were used. The corpus for this study was the spoken genre of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the results were then compared to Liu’s ( 2003 ) and Simpson and Mendis’s ( 2003 ) lists. The results were presented as tables manifesting the comparison of frequencies of figuratives in MICASE and the spoken BNC as well as in spoken American and British English.

Additionally, the number of color idioms were studies and also compared in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, British National Corpus, and TIME Magazine Corpus of American English by Vaclavikova ( 2010 ). The results manifested higher popularity of idioms in American English than in British English. Furthermore, the overall number of color idioms was greater in newspapers and magazines than in academic texts.

It can be very demanding and time consuming to search for a large number of idioms in large corpora. To date, not enough corpus-based studies have been conducted on idioms and the existing research has been limited to only some specific types of idioms such as core idioms or figuratives. Moreover, the corpora chosen for the studies have been restrained to the academic or spoken sections which are not very large in size. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to uncover the frequencies of all the idioms of the thematic index of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, grouped based on their topics and themes, along with their variations and forms in the large Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The search was done via a manuscript written by a computer programmer for this purpose. The search result is a list of 1506 idioms in 81 theme-based categories along with their frequencies per million, sorted from the most frequent to the least in each category.

This section begins by introducing the corpus and the idiom dictionary used in the present study. It then provides information on how the idioms were prepared and searched for in the corpus.

The research was based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) including 20 million words each year from 1990 to 2017; however, the purchased version of COCA for this study was composed of 520 million words in 220,225 texts from 1990 to 2015. COCA was created by Mark Davies, Professor of Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University. Currently, COCA is the most recent, comprehensive and balanced corpus of English language that exists. This corpus is divided evenly between five genres of spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals for each year and also overall. Each genre comes from various authentic sources. The genre of spoken consists of 109 million words (109,391,643) which are transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc.). The genre of fiction which has 105 million words (104,900,827) is from short stories and plays from literary magazines, children’s magazines, popular magazines, first chapters of first edition books 1990-present, and movie scripts. Popular magazine genre includes 110 million words (110,110,637) from about 100 magazines with a balanced mix of specific domains such as news, health, home and gardening, women, financial, religion, sports, etc. Time, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Christian Century, Sports Illustrated, etc. are some examples of magazines used for this purpose. For newspapers, 106 million words (105,963,844), a good mix of various sections such as local news, opinion, sports, financial, etc. of 10 newspapers including USA Today, New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. is included. Finally, the genre of academic journals with 103 million words (103,421,981), is from about 100 peer-reviewed journals covering the entire range of the Library of Congress classification system (e.g. a certain percentage from B (philosophy, psychology, religion), D (world history), K (education), T (technology), etc.), both overall and by number of words per year. It should be noted than the purchased corpus of COCA has 95% of the whole data and 5% is removed by the owner due to reasons of copyright. Table  1 summarizes COCA, its genres, and the number of words in each from 1990 to 2015.

Idiom dictionary

As the main source of the idioms, the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd ed., was chosen since it was the latest dictionary of idioms available to the researchers in digital format. This dictionary includes about 5000 British and American idioms along with their definitions, explanations and some with illustrative quotations and examples. Background information of some of the idioms is also attached in a box. Overall, a comprehensive picture of the idioms is presented in this dictionary. Moreover, at the end of the book, 1506 idioms with the same topics and themes are grouped together under 81 categories. This gives the users a vivid picture of those areas and aspects of life that have generated a rich variety of figurative expressions. The target idioms of the current corpus-based study were all the 1506 idioms included in the index. The 81 themes and the number of the idioms in each are illustrated in Table  2 .

The number of idioms in each theme differs ranging from 7 to 39 with a mean of 28. The theme of ‘pregnancy’ includes the least number and the ‘misfortune and adversity’ the largest number of idioms in this index.

Data collection procedure

Obtaining the frequencies of the idioms involved three main steps. First, a computer program was written; then the idioms were manually prepared to be searched by the designed system; and finally, they were searched for in the whole corpus of COCA.

Idioms transformation and coding procedure

First, all idioms of the index were extracted from the digital version of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms manually and a list of 1506 idioms was created. Each entry was checked again in the dictionary to add other variations of the idiom if present. For instance, the idiom “have seen better days” in the index has also another variation “have known better days”. Therefore, all the idioms of the list were updated based on their entries in the dictionary.

Normally, concordancers are used to extract frequencies from a given corpus. Concordancers are computer programs for text analysis usually used in corpus linguistics to retrieve alphabetically or otherwise sorted lists of linguistic data from a corpus. So far, four generations of concordancers have been developed; however, the third generation tools such as WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012 ) and AntConc (Anthony, 2012 ) have some limitations. For instance, they are not able to manage large corpora of more than 100 million words because of their architecture. The fourth generation tools such as c orpus.byu.edu (Davies, 2015 ), CQPweb (Hardie, 2013 ), and SketchEngine (Kilgariff, 2013 ) are mostly web-based and include a single corpus interface with their own specific controls and operation characteristics that cannot be easily adapted to every use. Given the mentioned shortcomings of the concordancers, researchers such as Anthony ( 2009 ), Biber, Conrad, and Reppen ( 1998 ), Gries ( 2009 ), and Weisser, M. ( 2009 ) maintain that the best solution for the corpus linguists is to program and develop their own tools for text analysis to fit their own needs.

Since there were a large number of idioms intended to be searched for in the large COCA, a professional computer programmer wrote a script in PHP for this purpose. In order for the search to be thorough and to include all forms and variations of each idiom, all the idioms were manually prepared for the program. The preparations were as follows:

The main verbs of the idioms that could take different forms depending on the context were identified and capitalized (e.g. the idiom “shake a leg” was rewritten as “SHAKE a leg”), and the system would search for idioms with all the grammatical forms.

Some idioms included possessive adjectives, subject and object pronouns or words such as something, someone, somebody, one, etc. that were not fixed and could be replaced by other words in the context. These words were changed into an asterisk symbol before the search (e.g. the idiom “rattle someone’s cage” were rewritten as “RATTLE * cage”). Different samples of some of these idioms were studied from the corpus and it was decided that the asterisks represent from no words up to three words during the search. For instance, the idiom “tied to someone’s apron strings” could be “tied to HER apron strings”, “tied to MOTHER ‘S apron strings” or “tied to HIS MOTHER ‘S apron strings” or in some cases it gives more space for possible adjectives and adverbs in the idioms; or the idiom “be one’s own man (or woman or person)” might be “be HIS OWN man” or “be VERY MUCH HIS own man”.

Some idioms may include interchangeable elements with the same overall meaning which can create nodes when searching for the frequencies. In case nodes were present in the idioms, the symbol “|” was used to separate the two or more options and search for them all (e.g. the idiom “cry over spilt (or spilled) milk” changed into “CRY over spilt|spilled milk”).

COCA has its own specific written format; e.g. contractions and possessives such as “‘s, n’t, ‘re, etc.” are separated by a space. Hence, the idioms including these contractions were rewritten as they are in the corpus (e.g. the idiom “Caesar’s wife” was written as “Caesar ‘s wife”).

In order to cover more related idioms some articles at the beginning of the idioms were omitted when possible (e.g. the idiom “a black sheep” was changed to “black sheep”).

Since some words such as rumor, honor, color, etc. have two different spellings, they were written as nodes separated by ‘|’ symbol in order to be more comprehensive e.g. the idiom “with flying colours” were rewritten as “with flying colours|colors”.)

In addition, a list of all English verbs and their forms (past tense, past participle, third person, and gerund) was added to the process to address the grammatical forms of each idiom. Some verbs such as have , to be , and modals also had their negatives and contracted forms in the verb list. For instance, for the verb have , the following were added and searched in the corpus: have, has, having, had,‘ve, ‘s, ‘d, haven’t, hasn’t, hadn’t, have got, has got, haven’t got, hasn’t got, hadn’t got, have not got, has not got, and had not got.

As an example, for the idiom “settle (or pay) a (or the) score”, the formula was written as “SETTLE|PAY a|the score” and the system searched for all the following idioms in the corpus and provided a frequency of all of them for each year and each genre separately and summed up the figures automatically:

Settle a score, settles a score, settled a score, settling a score

Settle the score, settles the score, settled the score, settling the score

Pay a score, pays a score, paid a score, paying a score

Pay the score, pays the score, paid the score, paying the score

Searching the corpus

First, the accuracy of the written script was tested, comparing some random idioms’ frequencies calculated by the current system with the frequencies received from the concordancer of the website of COCA. The matching results manifested that the script worked very well.

Afterwards, the written script broke the big COCA into smaller pieces and then used regular expressions -strings of text that allow creating patterns that help match, locate, and manage text in programming- to search for the frequencies of each idiom in the COCA. The designed system then provided a comprehensive spreadsheet of statistics with the frequencies of the idioms for each year from 1990 to 2015. The result of the search was a table with 1506 rows and 127 columns. Each genre in each year had a cell with a frequency result for each idiom. The frequencies were then summed up and the idioms in each theme category were sorted from the most frequent to the least. Some idioms such as “have a ball” or “past it” have both idiomatic and non-idiomatic meanings in different contexts. Hence, these idioms were manually searched for in the website of COCA and by reading all the existing contexts, their frequencies were recalculated again and their literal and non-idiomatic uses were subtracted. Some instances of both uses in the context are as follows:

(Spoken genre: NBC Today, 2011) We’re back from Seattle. We had a ball in Seattle. Thank you, everybody, for coming and being with us while we taped two shows.

(NEWS genre: Denver Post, 2009) In order for Johnson, Colorado State’s star running back, to get a job in the NFL, he would have to forget - at least for now - how to run like a football player. # “ Being a running back, you’re used to carrying the ball, and when I first got there, I was running the 40 like I had a ball in my hands, “ Johnson said. “

In the first context above, the idiom means having fun and enjoying oneself, while in the second the meaning of the phrase is quite literal. Moreover, the frequency of some of the top idioms that included asterisks were checked in the website of COCA again in order to omit irrelevant words that had substituted an asterisk.

A sample search result of an idiom in the corpus is shown below. An idiom such as “rest on one’s oars” was repeated 5 times in the corpus. The system searched for all the verb forms of the verb “rest” and all the possibilities of the words that could replace “one’s”. The five sample sentences are as follows:

(Fiction genre: Field & Stream, 1997) He rested on the oars and watched the water for the length of time it would have taken to make a couple dozen casts, to search under the alders, along the seam, beyond the chop.

(Fiction genre: Arkadians, 1995) By the time Oudeis called a halt, Lucian’s muscles were twitching in protest, and he was glad enough to rest on his oars .

(Fiction genre: Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, 1993) Just turned in my grades and resting on my oars .

(NEWS genre: Christian Science Monitor, 1993) But we are in no way guaranteed to keep in that position if we rest on our oars .

(NEWS genre: San Francisco Chronicle, 1991) My concern is that the industry has not done anything to improve the (accident) situation for 6 years -- they’re kind of resting on their oars , “said William Pugh, former top railroad investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board and now a private consultant.

By searching all the forms and variations of each idiom, the researchers attempted to reveal a comprehensive picture of the frequencies of the index. However, since idioms have a specific unpredictable nature at times, the full cover cannot be claimed.

To show the relative proportion of the idioms in the whole corpus of COCA, the frequencies of all the idioms were calculated per million and inserted in a table. Due to the very large size of the table, only the results of the first three themes, action, age, and ambition are depicted in Table  5 in Appendix.

Based on the search results, most of the idioms of the Oxford Dictionary index have the frequency of less than 1 per million in the whole corpus except for 17 idioms. Table  3 reports the idioms that had a frequency of above 1 per million in COCA along with their themes and frequencies.

The idiom “behind the scenes”, belonging to the theme of secrecy, seems to be the most frequent of all the idioms of the index with the frequency of 4.71 per million. Two instances of the idiom together with their sources, genres and years are given here.

(NEWS genre: USA Today, 2015) Everyone looks flawlessly glamorous for the Academy Awards, but behind the scenes, millions of dollars and thousands of hands are making sure the show goes off without a hitch.

(Magazine genre: People, 2012) Everyone saw me on TV or read articles, and it was all about my great marriage, the white picket fence, all this success and my perfect life. But behind the scenes, it was a struggle, “says Vonn, now 28, over lunch.

The next most frequent idiom in the list is “under fire”, related to theme of criticism, which was repeated 3.22 per million in the whole corpus.

(News: Atlanta Journal Constitution, 2009) The Bush administration came under fire in 2006 and 2007 for what appeared to be the politically motivated firings of several U.S. attorneys, amid accusations that administration officials were trying to turn the prosecutors into partisan agents.

(Academic: Professional School Counselling, 2005) To be sure, middle school counselors’ efforts are most accepted and become more valuable when harmonious to the focus on academic achievement. This is particularly true as middle schools have come under fire for the declines in achievement during the middle school years.

On the other hand, 234 idioms of the index, for example, “go down a storm” and “knight of the road”, appeared to be non-existent in the whole corpus of COCA. Of the 1506 idioms, 15.5% had the frequency of zero, 726 of them (48.2%) occurred between one and 40 times, and 546 idioms (36.3%) repeated more than 40 times in the whole corpus.

The overall result of the corpus search of the themes is presented in Table  4 . The themes are sorted based on their overall frequencies in the corpus and the figures show the frequencies per million.

The theme of secrecy, consisting of 29 idioms with the overall frequency of 10.26 per million, is the most frequent theme, while the topic of fools and foolishness including 19 idioms with the overall frequency of 0.16 per million is the least frequent one.

Discussion and conclusions

Searching for the idioms in the thematic index of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms and their forms and variations in the largest freely-available corpus of English, COCA, led to a frequency list of idioms organized based on 81 topics and sorted by the frequencies of occurrence (Table 5 in Appendix). Overall, among the 1506 idioms searched for in the corpus, 17 had frequencies above 1 per million and 234 idioms were not found at all.

The quantitative comparisons of the findings, idiom lists and the frequencies of the present study with the previous similar ones (Grant, 2007 ; Liu, 2003 ; Moon, 1998b ; Simpson & Mendis, 2003 ) are difficult to assess because of the following reasons: The idioms chosen in this research were not similar to the previous corpus search. The criteria of choosing an idiom, the type and number of idioms were quite different in each study. We searched for all types of idioms recorded in the thematic list of the Oxford Dictionary of Idiom, whereas former studies focused on different sets of idioms such as core or figurative idioms. What is more, the corpora (e.g. BNC, MICASE) and the sections or genres (e.g. academic or spoken English) in other studies differed from the current one which makes comparison even more difficult due to the relative infrequency of the idioms.

The present corpus-based study has shed light on the more frequent idioms of various themes in order to ease their teaching and learning. As mentioned earlier, native-like idiomaticity has been the target of language learning in many cases, so collocations, formulaicity and idiomaticity should also be the focus of educators. Prefabricated chunks such as idioms aid learners to improve fluency specifically in spoken language since they are retrieved from the memory with less hesitations (Boers et al., 2006 ; Mauranen, 2004 ; Teodorescu, 2015 ). Based on the fundamental attitudes of the lexical approach the use of awareness-raising activities directing students’ attention to the chunks in a given text is essential. When it comes to natural use of language, idioms without a doubt cannot be neglected. Therefore, the result of the present study can benefit English teachers, learners, as well as materials developers in several ways.

First, instead of using intuition to develop the language learning materials, the real use of language from the corpus can provide more authentic sources. To highlight the importance of corpus studies, Liu ( 2003 ), after analysis of some teaching and reference materials, criticized the way the idioms were selected which was quite inconsistent since they included less frequent and more transparent idioms but missed some highly frequent or highly opaque items. The selection of materials based on corpus studies would be more systematic and rigorous comparing to the intuition-based sources. It can help in “selecting and sequencing linguistic content, as well as determining relative emphases” (Tsui, 2004 , p. 40). The present study produced frequency lists for a large number of idioms (1506 idioms) from a wide variety of topics (81 thematical categories). This can provide language teachers and learners with diverse opportunities to practice idioms and help them prioritize what is more important and beneficial to teach and learn first. Given the short amount of time and the large amount of materials teachers and learners have to deal with, it is quite crucial to first focus on the more useful and frequently repeated parts of the language rather than spending time on the less frequent ones. Based on the lists provided in this study, language teachers and learners can easily select idioms from a specific theme of their interest knowing how frequent that idiom is in the authentic texts produced by native speakers. This can be of great help in learning idioms which are of more use in different contexts. As Muller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth ( 2004 ) argue “teachers need to be able to present language as naturalistic examples of the target language, to expose learners to examples of language currently in use, with features which are characteristic of authentic discourse in the target language (p. 28)”.

Second, the findings of this study can be of paramount importance in the contexts of EFL where there is often not enough exposure to target language for learners. In such contexts, education should focus more on frequent and authentic parts of the language. This can assist them with learning idioms that are probably more useful to them. Furthermore, information about idiom distribution and frequency “may help students develop a more complete grasp of the idioms or decide to what extent they want to learn and use those idioms” (Liu, 2003 , p. 687).

Third, the frequency lists of idioms can be employed by materials developers and language teachers to develop different exercises for learners at different proficiency levels. As argued by Simpson and Mendis ( 2003 ), when it comes to pedagogical materials, pupils have proved to respond well to multiple-choice exercises using the idioms’ definitions. They also respond well to the items with extracts from the corpus as the stem in which they have to guess the meaning of the idioms. However, the importance of rich contextual clues in the selected sentences from the corpus should be taken into account.

Fourth, test developers can also benefit from the results of this study as they can use the frequency lists in preparing test items. Depending on the proficiency levels of the testes, idioms of different frequencies can be included in the test. Furthermore, different themes may also be considered in preparing test items.

Finally, learners’ attention should be drawn to formulaic language during their process of learning and one of the most practical ways to do it is to present the idioms in a theme-based manner. Learning figurative expressions such as idioms by using their common themes can create the possibility of better retention since these topics and themes present a framework and organization for the random lists and make it much easier for the learners to grasp them more deeply (Boers, 2000 ; Ellis, 1994 ). Raising the students’ awareness for categorizing the idioms based on their topics and themes during the classroom activities, not only can help them learn the idioms more deeply and easily, but also can assist them to be more independent and successful outside the classrooms.

Limitations

The inaccessibility of more up-to-date and recent dictionaries of idioms in digital format was a limitation that needs to be considered in using or generalizing the results of this study. The main source of the idioms of the study was the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms with about 5000 British and American idioms, and the research was based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is possible that British idioms are not fully and representatively presented in COCA.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

The datasets generated in the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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ER conducted the study under the supervision of AA. All the steps of the research were done collaboratively. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Elaheh Rafatbakhsh is a PhD candidate of TEFL in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Shiraz University. Her main research interests include Computer Assisted Language Learning, Language Assessment and Corpus Linguistics.

Alireza Ahmadi is an associate professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran. He teaches second language assessment and language learning courses. His main area of research is second language assessment.

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Rafatbakhsh, E., Ahmadi, A. A thematic corpus-based study of idioms in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 4 , 11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-019-0076-4

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Original research article, the development of idiom knowledge across the lifespan.

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  • 1 Center for Language and Cognition, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
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Knowledge of multi-word expressions, such as break the ice , is an important aspect of language proficiency that so far we have known surprisingly little about. For example, it is largely unknown how much variability there is between speakers with respect to the number of different items that they know, or what factors contribute to their acquisition. This lack of knowledge seriously limits the generalizability of experimental studies on the production and comprehension of multi-word expressions (usually idioms) and generally suggests that there still is a sizable unknown territory of language knowledge to explore. Here, we present the results of two familiarity ratings for a large sample of Dutch idioms and a large number of participants that varied in age between 12 and 86 years old. The data show considerable variation between participants and between idioms. Non-linear mixed-effects regression analyses revealed that the age of participants, but not their education, as well as the frequency and decomposability of the idioms influenced the familiarity scores. Our findings suggest that the knowledge of multiword expressions develops across the lifespan, is acquired from exposure, and—in participants younger than about 40 years of age—varies with item decomposability.

Introduction

In everyday language use, many concepts are expressed by multi-word expressions, such as hit the road (depart), break the ice (relieve social tension by means of a remark) or how are you (a formula exchanged when people meet). These expressions must be learned alongside the words and rules that enable us to generate new sentences and represent an important aspect of what Pawley and Syder (1983) referred to as nativelike language proficiency. Based on analyses of conversational data, they estimated the number of such expressions in English as hundreds of thousands and suggested that access to these prespecified expressions in long-term memory is a prerequisite for fluent speech. Yet, even though the importance of multi-word expressions has been recognized in psycholinguistics (as evidenced by numerous experimental studies on the acquisition, processing and production of idioms, which we shortly discuss below), our knowledge about these processing units is still very limited. That is, in contrast to our knowledge about single words, we do not know what factors constrain the multi-word vocabulary and the way in which it varies between speakers. Here, we therefore want to explore how speaker characteristics (age, education) and item characteristics (frequency, decomposability) conjointly affect the acquisition of the Dutch idiom vocabulary across the lifespan.

In an exploration of what he called the boundaries of the lexicon (and thus the theoretical scope of grammatical theories), Jackendoff (1995) argued that the large number of multiword expressions that speakers of a language know and recognize—which he estimated at about the same size as the number of single words—must in fact be considered entries in the mental lexicon. He illustrated his position with the wheel of fortune corpus, which included about 600 compounds, idioms, names and clichés, all considered sufficiently familiar to native speakers to be included in a popular TV game show that required participants to guess these phrases with a few hints. Examples include I cried my eyes out, a breath of fresh air and May the Force be with you .

While the nature of the underlying representations of such well-known phrases is still a matter of debate in linguistics and psycholinguistics (e.g., Cacciari and Tabossi, 1988 ; Fillmore et al., 1988 ; Cutting and Bock, 1997 ; Jackendoff, 1997 ; Titone and Connine, 1999 ; Sprenger et al., 2006 ; Libben and Titone, 2008 ), most idiom researchers will agree that they need to be included in the mental lexicon. However, our knowledge about this part of the lexicon is still limited. That is, we do not know how many multi-word expressions a speaker can be expected to be familiar with, or what this knowledge depends on. Estimates in the literature (such as Pawley and Syder, 1983 , hundreds of thousands ) are often extrapolations from small samples of conversation. At the same time, collections of multiword expressions in dictionaries or analyses of large corpora (e.g., Moon, 1998 ) can only provide upper boundaries for the knowledge that a native speaker might acquire. Neither method can provide us with a reliable estimate of the multiword vocabulary, or the conditions that affect its size.

Psycholinguistic approaches to multiword expressions typically focus on idioms. Apart from the fact that they form relatively fixed combinations of words, their meanings are not a direct function of their constituent words, making them an interesting test case for theories of language comprehension and production. For example, depending on the context, the English phrase to break the ice either refers to relieving the tension in a social situation or to the actual process of crushing frozen water. However, given a context that fits better with the figurative interpretation, native speakers can easily retrieve the correct form and meaning from memory (in production and comprehension, respectively).

Experimental work that tries to uncover the representations and processes that are responsible for the fast and efficient production and comprehension of idioms depends on high-quality stimulus materials. There are two main criteria that play role in this context: first, the idioms must be representative for a larger collection of items (e.g., with respect to the relationship between form and meaning), and second they must reflect the subjects' knowledge. This second criterion is especially difficult to fulfill. Does every speaker of English know the idiom to kick the bucket , or is that knowledge mostly restricted to the subset of idiom researchers? What other well-known expressions are there, and where are these items located in the frequency distribution? In idiom studies, questions about specific items are often answered on an ad-hoc basis, with stimulus materials being rated for familiarity in the context of a specific study. The number of items in these studies rarely exceeds twenty (e.g., Bobrow and Bell, 1973 : 5 items; Swinney and Cutler, 1979 : 22 items; Cacciari and Tabossi, 1988 : 20 items; Cutting and Bock, 1997 : 36 items; Gibbs, 1991 : 20 items; Sprenger et al., 2006 : 16 items;), and it is unclear in how far those are representative for the category of idioms as a whole. This lack of knowledge is a fundamental problem for psycholinguistic research on idiom production and comprehension, as it limits the potential generalizability of our data.

For various languages, such as English ( Titone and Connine, 1994 ; Libben and Titone, 2008 ; Bulkes and Tanner, 2017 ; Nordmann and Jambazova, 2017 ), French ( Caillies, 2009 ; Bonin et al., 2013 , 2017 ), German ( Citron et al., 2016 ), Italian ( Tabossi et al., 2011 ) and Chinese ( Li et al., 2016 ), norms have been published with the aim to increase the reliability of stimulus material in psycholinguistic studies on idioms. These norms provide a number of interesting measures, such as familiarity, decomposability, predictability or emotional valence, for several hundreds of items per language. That is, for the average speaker of the language in question, these norms provide a best guess about how a specific item scores on the various dimensions, making it possible for researchers to select items from the corresponding distributions.

However, while clearly increasing the reliability and validity of idiom tasks, the use of norms is not without problems either. It is important to realize that there is no such thing as an average native speaker: they differ with respect to socio-economic backgrounds, education, personality, and age. Given the effect of such variables on the sizes of our vocabularies at large ( Brysbaert et al., 2016 ), it is conceivable that there are considerable individual differences in the idiom vocabulary as well. For example, Brysbaert et al. (2016) showed that the single-word vocabulary expands rapidly during adolescence, but keeps growing steadily until old age, with an average increase of one word per two days. In other words, age has an important effect on vocabulary that exceeds well-beyond the initial stages of language acquisition and cognitive maturation. Yet, idiom norming studies traditionally do not take this factor into account. They usually average across age, often sample from a student population only (e.g., Li et al., 2016 ), and sometimes do not mention their participants' age at all (e.g., Bulkes and Tanner, 2017 ). Whether age affects the idiom vocabulary in a similar way as the single-word vocabulary is therefore an open question.

Here, we want to explore the contribution of age to the development of the idiom vocabulary in more detail. If age indeed played an important role in idiom acquisition, this would have important consequences for the design of experiments that are to reveal the psycholinguistic processes and representations involved in the production and comprehension of idioms. Apart from the need to calibrate idiom norms for age, an age effect on idiom knowledge would stress the role of individual differences on online idiom comprehension. Reports on such effects so far have been few, but fairly consistent. Cain et al. (2005) , for example, studied the relationship between reading comprehension and idiom interpretation in 9-year olds and found that poor comprehenders were less able to use context when interpreting opaque, but not transparent (or rather, decomposable) idioms. Cacciari et al. (2007) compared slow and fast participants in a comprehension task and found that slow participants needed more perceptual input to identify an idiom and to activate its meaning. Columbus et al. (2015) found effects of executive control capacity on reading times for metaphors, but not for idioms. In contrast, Cacciari et al. (2018) found that idiom comprehension was affected by individual differences in working memory capacity, inhibitory control, and crystallized verbal intelligence, as well as personality-related variables (State Anxiety and Openness to Experience). Taken together, these studies indicate that individual differences affect online idiom comprehension processes, and thus are likely to affect acquisition as well. However, none of the studies considered age as a separate factor.

How would we expect age to affect the idiom vocabulary? First, the pattern that was observed by Brysbaert et al. (2016) for the development of the single-word vocabulary may be further delayed by the late development of figurative competence (i.e., the age at which children are able to understand an idiom's figurative interpretation, at about 9 years of age; Levorato and Cacciari, 1992 ), as well as by the relatively abstract concepts that are expressed by many idioms. So far, there are only few empirical data to backup this assertion, as developmental research on idioms has mostly focused on figurative competence, rather than the age at which children acquire specific tokens (e.g., Nippold and Martin, 1989 ; Levorato and Cacciari, 1992 ; Nippold and Rudzinski, 1993 ; Nippold and Taylor, 1995 ; Nippold and Duthie, 2003 ; Hung and Nippold, 2014 ). For example, Nippold and Martin (1989) report an increase in the ability to interpret idioms from the age of 14–17. As their observations are based on only twenty items per subject, we cannot draw conclusions about the size of the subjects' idiom vocabularies.

Beyond the age of adolescence, there are likewise only few data points to sketch the acquisition curve. A study by Kuiper et al. (2009) shows a rise in idiom knowledge until the age of 50–60 years, followed by a slight drop-off in the 65+ cohort (ten subjects per cohort). A drawback of this study is that the observations (based on 20 items) are not backed up by inferential statistics, making it difficult to judge their reliability. However, the pattern has partly been confirmed by Escaip (2015) . Replicating Kuiper et al.'s (2009) study in Spanish, English, and French, she found a significant positive correlation of age with idiom knowledge in all three languages. That is, the older the participants, the more idioms they knew (with ages ranging between 15 and 83). For English, but not for the other two languages, Escaip also found a significant decrease of knowledge for speakers of 65 years and older.

The second important factor that we want to explore here is idiom frequency. In contrast to age, which is a characteristic of the subjects, frequency is a characteristic of the item itself. Similar to single-word acquisition, it is conceivable that frequency can explain a large part of the variance between idioms. This is supported by the observation that, in the past decade, a considerable number of studies has been published that demonstrate an important role for frequency in the acquisition of multi-word sequences. For example, Bannard and Matthews (2008) showed that children as young as 2 years old are sensitive to the frequency with which specific word combinations occur in child-directed speech: when asked to repeat sequences of words such as a drink of tea , they make fewer errors and—by the age of 3—also respond faster to high frequent word combinations than to matched low-frequent combinations. Likewise, Arnon and Snider (2010) demonstrated that adults are sensitive to the frequency of compositional multi-word phrases like don't have to worry . Their subjects responded faster in a phrasal decision task when the phrases were more frequent. Similar facilitatory effects for high-frequent items have been observed for language production in adult speakers, both for literal and more idiomatic sequences (e.g., Tremblay and Tucker, 2011 ; Janssen and Barber, 2012 ; Arnon and Cohen Priva, 2013 ; Sprenger and van Rijn, 2013 ).

The third factor that we include here is idiom decomposability, which was defined as the extent to which the idiom word meanings are related to the figurative meaning of the expression (similar to, for example, Rommers et al., 2013 ). Similar to frequency, decomposability is a feature of the individual idiom that may affect the ease with which a specific item can be acquired. If an idiom is highly decomposable, knowledge about its individual words may help the learner to deduce the idiom's meaning and/or to remember the item more easily when he or she encounters it again, since the words themselves may act as memory cues. This may explain why the poor comprehenders in the study by Cain et al. (2005) did not have difficulties interpreting decomposable idioms, in contrast to opaque idioms. From studies on online idiom processing, we know that decomposability is a relevant factor. Processing advantages have been reported for decomposable idioms over non-decomposable idioms: for example, with respect to sentence verification latencies ( Gibbs et al., 1989 ) and in a lexical decision task that used idioms as primes for target words that were related to the item's figurative meaning ( Caillies and Butcher, 2007 ). However, the exact nature of the way in which decomposability modulates online processing is still disputed, as its effect is not always facilitatory. Titone and Libben (2014) found late inhibitory effects of decomposability in a cross-modal semantic priming task and Titone et al. (2019) observed late inhibitory effects of decomposability during idiom reading. Interestingly, Westbury and Titone (2011) found an interaction of decomposability with age: in a literality judgment task, older adults were relatively slower than younger adults to accept non-decomposable idioms with a literal meaning and made more errors.

In the present article, we want to study the effect of age as an easy to assess speaker characteristic on idiom familiarity and compare it to the effects of idiom frequency and decomposability. If idioms indeed have their own entries in the mental lexicon, the idiom familiarity curve should be highly similar to that for single-word vocabulary (across speakers and items). That is, it should be modulated by age and education, with an early phase of rapid expansion, followed by a long phase of moderate but steady increase, and possibly decrease (as in Kuiper et al., 2009 ). Per item, this effect should be modulated by frequency, as we can expect the probability of acquisition to be a function of exposure. It may also be affected by idiom decomposability, which is supposed to reflect the ease with which an item can be analyzed, encoded, and retrieved ( Caillies and Butcher, 2007 ). To test these predictions, we collected familiarity ratings for 194 Dutch idioms in two online rating studies and assessed the corresponding corpus frequencies. In addition to the ratings, respondents provided information about their gender, age, and level of education.

The Idiom Database

For the exploration of the effect of age on idiom familiarity (Study 1 and 2 presented below), we have composed a small database with Dutch idioms. The database is available in the supplementary materials 1 and contains 189 Dutch idioms with their meaning and associated frequency counts. For all idioms (and control items, as explained below) we additionally collected decomposability ratings in an online questionnaire.

Materials and Methods

Ninety-nine Dutch idioms with two nouns were collected for Study 1. They were not controlled for syntactic structure or position of the nouns, but often contained prepositional phrases. The number of nouns was controlled with respect to the item's usability in an unrelated behavioral experiment. In addition to the experimental items, four German idioms were literally translated to Dutch and included as control items. All items were presented in past tense and preceded by the temporal adverb “Toen”: (at a time in the past), for example “Toen kwam de aap uit de mouw.” ( Then the monkey came out of the sleeve , which means that the true nature of a situation, the true character of a person, or a hidden motive was being revealed).

Ninety Dutch idioms with one noun were collected for Study 2. Again, syntactic structure or noun position were not controlled for. All items were presented in past tense and preceded by the temporal adverb “Toen” (at a time in the past), for example “Toen zette hij hem op straat.” ( Then he put him on the street , which means then he laid him off ) In contrast with Study 1, no control items were included. Thus, all idioms were existing Dutch idioms.

Frequencies for the idioms and translated German idioms were obtained from the Lassy Large corpus ( Van Noord et al., 2013 ), a 700-million-word corpus of Dutch texts with automatically assigned syntactic annotations that is combined of both spoken and written sub-corpora (including the Dutch Wikipedia ). By searching for lemmas, rather than exact word matching, most idioms were detected: the counts ranged between 0 (4 items) and 4,688. Surprisingly, three of the five control also were found in the corpus, probably due to their similarity with other Dutch idioms (for example, the German idiom Then he shot sparrows with cannons is very similar to the Dutch idiom Then he shot mosquitos with cannons ). Before analysis, the frequency counts were log-transformed. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the log-transformed frequencies.

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Figure 1. Left: Frequency (log-transformed) of the 194 Dutch idioms and translated German idioms, ordered. Right: Comparison of the frequency distributions in Study 1 and Study 2.

Participants

The decomposability questionnaire was advertised under students of the University of Groningen. We restricted the age range to 18–25 years old, to keep the decomposability ratings consistent with earlier studies ( Rommers et al., 2013 ). The data consisted of 57 entries, but we excluded one participant who was not monolingual Dutch (a Frisian-Dutch bilingual), 21 participants who contributed less than ten ratings, and one participant whose age did not match the target age range. The clean data consisted of 34 participants in the age range 21–26 years old (mean 24.3 years old; 8 men) who contributed each 15–98 ratings (mean 89.9). Participants did not receive compensation for their participation.

The questionnaire was implemented using the survey software Qualtrics (Qualtrics, Provo, UT). Participants could anonymously access the questionnaire with a link. At the start of the experiment, participants were informed on the goal of the survey and gave their consent that their participation was voluntary. Participants were asked to read idioms and to judge to what extent the meaning of the individual words was related to the figurative meaning of the expression as a whole (cf. Rommers et al., 2013 ). They had to click on one of five radio buttons, labeled from left to right as “1 (geen relatie tussen individuele woorden en figuurlijke betekenis)” ( no relation between the individual words and the figurative meaning ), “2,” “3,” “4,” and “5 (sterke relatie tussen individuele woorden en figuurlijke betekenis)” ( strong relation between the individual words and the figurative meaning ), or on a sixth radio button labeled as “ik ben niet bekend met deze uitdrukking” ( I am not familiar with this idiom ). Three idioms were presented individually at the start of the questionnaire to serve as anchors for the range of the decomposability scale ( anchoring ), but later idioms were presented in a random order. The idioms were divided in two lists of each 100 items (including the anchors). Each participant saw only one of the two lists.

The data were analyzed using Generalized Additive Mixed Models ( Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990 ; Wood, 2017 ; GAMMs), a non-linear mixed-effects regression method. GAMMs do not assume a linear relationship between the dependent variable and a covariate, but the relationship is estimated using penalized regression splines. The method does not require the user to specify the shape of the regression line on beforehand, but it is estimated based on the data. Other reasons for choosing this non-linear regression method are that it allows to include tensor product interactions for estimating interactions between multiple non-linear covariates, and it allows to include non-linear random effects (see for introductions Wieling, 2018 ; van Rij et al., in press ). The statistical analyses are performed in R version 3.4.4 (2018-03-15; R Core Team, 2018 ), using the package mgcv version 1.8-24 ( Wood, 2017 ) implementing GAMMs, and the package itsadug 2.3 ( van Rij et al., 2017 ) for evaluation and visualization of the statistical models.

Decomposability Ratings

From the 3,056 responses, 504 (16.5%) were of the category I am not familiar with this idiom (henceforth “unfamiliar” responses). These responses were excluded from the analysis. A logistic mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that the proportion of “unfamiliar” responses was significantly influenced by the idioms' frequencies [ χ ( 2 ) 2 = 24.02, p < 0.001]: the proportion of “unfamiliar” responses is larger for low-frequent idioms than for high-frequent idioms (see Supplementary Materials for the complete analysis).

All idioms were seen by at least thirteen participants. However, the number of actual decomposability ratings (i.e., when participants did not give an “unfamiliar” response) varied strongly between idioms, ranging from 2 to 34 (mean 13.1). Figure 2 shows this variation in the number or ratings that was collected for each idiom: On the right end of the x-axis, there is one idiom that received a decomposability score from all 34 participants, because it was included as anchor. At the left end of the x-axis we find one of the translated German idioms with no decomposability ratings. All 13 participants who were presented with this idiom indicated that they were not familiar with it. We excluded this item from further analysis, accordingly.

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Figure 2 . Histogram of the number of decomposability ratings per idiom. The x-axis shows the number of decomposability ratings, and the y-axis the number of idioms that received that number of ratings.

We did not use the average rating per idiom as decomposability score, to avoid a potential subject bias influencing the decomposability scores for the idioms with a low number of ratings. Instead, we fitted a GAMM with random effects for participants and idioms to account for the participants' response biases and the variation between idioms. Random effects allow for partial pooling: the estimates for idioms that only have a few observations will pull toward the average (shrinkage); and the idiom estimates may be corrected for subject biases, as the subject mean is taken into account. From this statistical model we extracted an estimated decomposability score for each idiom (the script is available in the Supplementary Materials). To fit the ordered categorical nature of the decomposability ratings (5-point scale), we used the GAM ordered categorical family ( Wood et al., 2016 ). Figure 3 (left panel) visualizes the difference between the mean rating scores (x-axis) and the estimated decomposability scores (y-axis). Figure 3 (right panel) compares the estimated decomposability scores for Study 1 and Study 2.

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Figure 3 . Decomposability scores. Left: Mean rating scores (x-axis) vs. estimated rating scores with partial pooling (y-axis). The dashed lines mark the center of the scale. Right: Comparison of the estimated rating scores in Study 1 and Study 2.

Finally, we analyzed the effects of the idiom's frequency on the decomposability score. We used the GAM ordered categorical family ( Wood et al., 2016 ) to fit the decomposability ratings (5-point scale). The log-transformed frequencies were included as non-linear main effect. In addition, by-Subject non-linear random smooths were included for Frequency and random intercepts for Idiom. However, the effect of Frequency was not significant [ F (1.001, 2381.614) = 2.69; p = 0.1].

In the following sections we will use item frequencies and decomposability ratings as predictors for the familiarity ratings of Study 1 and Study 2.

Study 1: Two-Noun Idioms

In the first online questionnaire, we collected familiarity ratings for 104 Dutch idioms and control items with two nouns.

The questionnaire was advertised via social media (Facebook and Whatsapp) in the personal networks of the first and last author. The data consisted of 319 entries, but we excluded 25 participants who were not monolingual Dutch (13 of which were Frisian-Dutch bilingual). Subsequently, 37 participants were removed because the participants contributed less then ten ratings. The clean data consisted of 257 participants in the age range 12–86 years old (mean 37.7; 65 men) who contributed 96–104 ratings. Participants did not receive compensation for their participation.

Materials and Design

Ninety-nine Dutch idioms with two nouns were collected for this study. In addition, five German idioms were literally translated to Dutch and included as control items. The form of the materials (Then the monkey came out of the sleeve) was identical to the one described in section The idiom database.

All participants saw the same 104 idioms, but the order or presentation was randomized per participant. In addition to rating the idioms, participants were asked background questions about their gender, the year and month of birth, and their highest completed education (elementary school, high school, vocational education, or university).

Participants could perform the questionnaire online on their computer, laptop, or tablet, or smartphone. The type of device was not registered. We have implemented the questionnaire using the survey software Qualtrics. Participants could anonymously access the questionnaire with a link. At the start of the experiment, participants were informed on the goal of the survey and they gave their consent that their participation was voluntary.

Participants were asked to read idioms and to judge whether their age peers would recognize this idiom when it would be used in a talk show. They had to click on one of five radio buttons, labeled from left to right as “1 (nog nooit gehoord)” ( never heard before ), “2,” “3,” “4,” and “5 (heel bekend)” ( very well-known ). Three idioms were presented individually at the start of the questionnaire to serve as anchors for the range of the familiarity scale ( anchoring ), but later idioms were presented all at once in a long list in a random order to reduce the number of mouse clicks.

Figure 4 shows the average rating per participant, plotted against their age (Left panel), the average rating per idiom and participant age (Center panel), and the average rating per age, collapsed over participants and idioms (Right panel). What immediately stands out from these plots is the variation between participants and between items. A closer look reveals that with younger ages the variation is larger than with older ages. Finally, the grand averages show us a clear increase in idiom familiarity over age, which continues in older ages. The ratings for each education level and the average age per education level are presented in Table 1 .

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Figure 4 . Average familiarity ratings in study 1. Left: Average familiarity ratings per participant (y-axis) and the participant's age (x-axis). Center: Average familiarity ratings per idiom (y-axis) per age group (x-axis; in bins of 5 years, and jitter added for presentation purposes). Right: Grand average of familiarity ratings (y-axis) per age group (x-axis; in bins of 5 years). The solid red dots plot the grand average collapsed over all idioms, and the gray circles plot the grand average of the control items only.

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Table 1 . Average ratings and average ages per education level in Study 1.

The data were analyzed using GAMMs ( Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990 ; Wood, 2017 ). We included Education and Gender as categorical predictors in the statistical model. Education is a three-level predictor describing the participant's education using the categories “University,” “Vocational education,” and “Other” (collapsing elementary school and high school). Further, we included the covariates Age , the participant's age in years, Frequency , the log-transformed frequency of the idiom, Decomposability , the estimated decomposability scores, and their interactions, and by-participant random smooths over Frequency and over Decomposability, and by-idiom random smooths over Age. These three random smooths account for variations between participants and idioms, capturing random intercept differences and non-linear random deviations from the regression lines.

The dependent variable is the rating that participants provided for each idiom on a five-point rating scale (1 being unknown, and 5 being well-known). To account for the non-Gaussian nature of the dependent variable, the model was fitted using the GAM ordered categorical family, which implements regression for ordered categorical data ( Wood et al., 2016 ). The smoothing parameter estimation method fREML was used, because the number of idioms and participants was too large for using ML. The method fREML allows for discretizing covariates and thereby decreasing the processing time enormously. A disadvantage of using fREML is that model comparisons are less reliable (see Wieling, 2018 ). Therefore, we did not only test a backward-fitting model comparison procedure using AIC and fREML, but also used the summary statistics and visual inspection of the model to determine the best-fitting model (cf. van Rij et al., 2019 ).

The manual backward-fitting model comparison procedure suggested that the non-linear three-way interaction between Age, Decomposability, and Frequency was not significantly contributing to the model [ χ ( 4 ) 2 = 3.37, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = −0.66]. The summary statistics of the full model confirmed that the interaction surface was not significantly different from zero [ F (1.0, 25792.4) = 2.16; p > 0.1). The non-linear two-way interaction between Decomposability and Frequency also did not show significance in the model comparison procedure [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 2.06, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = −0.83; summary statistics: F (3.2, 25792.4) = 1.21; p > 0.1]. The interaction between Age and Frequency was significantly contributing to the model [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 12.21, p < 0.001; ΔAIC = −7.10; summary statistics: F (7.0, 25792.4) = 4.01; p < 0.001]. The interaction between Age and Decomposability was found marginally significant [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 4.11, p = 0.42; ΔAIC = 1.05] in the model comparison procedure, but the summary statistics indicated that the interaction surface was different from zero [ F (1.0, 25792.4) = 7.48; p < 0.01]. The categorical predictors Gender [ χ ( 1 ) 2 = −0.44, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = −0.02] and Education [ χ ( 2 ) 2 = 0.72, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = 0.47] did not contribute to the model, and were excluded from the model. The best-fitting model included the non-linear interactions between Age and Frequency and between Age and Decomposability and the non-linear main effects of Age, Frequency, and Decomposability. The best-fitting GAMM model: Rating ~ s(Age) + s(LogFreq) + s(Decomp) + ti(Age, LogFreq) + ti(Age, Decomp) + s(LogFreq, Subject, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1) + s(Decomp, Subject, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1) + s(Age, Sentence, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1), with the last three terms being non-linear random effects. In the best-fitting model, the main effects of Age [ F (3.2, 25792.7) = 31.30; p < 0.001) and Frequency [ F (3.192, 25792.736) = 24.39; p < 0.001] were significantly different from zero, but not the main effect of Decomposability [ F (1.1, 25792.7) = 3.56; p = 0.068].

Figure 5 visualizes the estimates of the best-fitting GAMM by plotting the fitted effects (i.e., the sum of all model terms, which results in the model's estimate of the familiarity rating). The left panel shows the estimated effect of Age on the familiarity rating: the familiarity increases with age until around 60 years. Note that the values of the fitted effects are not directly comparable with the rating scale, because ordered categorical GAMMs use transformed values. The estimated cut-off points are added in red and these indicate how the transformed values relate to the response ratings. The Center panel shows the interaction between Age and Log Frequency in a contour plot, with on the z-axis the model's estimates for the familiarity ratings, again on the transformed scale. The interaction surface shows that for medium and high frequency values, the familiarity increases with age and is at ceiling for older participants. However, for the lowest frequency values, all age groups respond with a low familiarity value (i.e., the horizontal lines at the bottom). This is probably caused by the low frequency and control items, which also were rated as unfamiliar by the older participants. The Right panel visualizes the interaction between Decomposability and Age. Idioms with low decomposability scores are rated lower in familiarity than idioms with high decomposability scores. However, this decomposability effect is only found for younger and middle-aged adults, not for the older adults (> 60 years).

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Figure 5 . Fitted effects of GAMM analysis of Study 1. Random effects are set to zero. Left: Estimated effect of Age (with pointwise 95% confidence intervals) for median values of LogFrequency (5.35) and Decomposability (2.35). Age is presented on x-axis, and the estimated familiarity rating on the y-axis. The red horizontal lines indicate the estimated cut-off points that relate the estimated values to the five response options. Center: Non-linear interaction between Age (x-axis) and Log Frequency (y-axis). The colors and contour lines indicate the value of the estimated ratings (z-axis). Right: Non-linear interaction between Age (x-axis) and Decomposability (y-axis). The colors and contour lines indicate the value of the estimated ratings (z-axis).

Study 2: One-Noun Idioms

To verify whether the age effect also applies to other idioms and participants, we ran a second online questionnaire in which familiarity ratings for Dutch idioms were collected. This time the idioms had a different structure: instead of two nouns, the majority of these idioms contained one noun. The procedure of the experiment was exactly the same, only the participants and materials were different.

The questionnaire was advertised via social media (Facebook and Whatsapp) in the personal networks of the second author. The data consisted of 173 entries, but we excluded 56 participants who were not monolingual Dutch (48 of which were Frisian-Dutch bilingual). Subsequently, 12 entries were removed because the participants contributed less than ten ratings. The clean data consisted of data from 105 participants in the age range 19–76 years old (mean 42.9; 20 men) who contributed 15–90 ratings. Participants did not receive compensation for their participation.

Ninety Dutch idioms with one noun were collected for this study. All items were presented in past tense and preceded by the temporal adverb “Toen” (at a time in the past), for example “Toen zette hij hem op straat.” ( Then he put him on the street , then he laid him off) In contrast to Study 1, no control items were included. Thus, all idioms were existing Dutch idioms.

All participants saw the same 90 idioms, but the order of presentation was randomized per participant. In addition to rating the idioms, participants were asked background questions about their gender, the year and month of birth, and their highest completed education (elementary school, high school, vocational education, or university).

Figure 6 shows the average familiarity rating over age for participants (left panel), for idioms (center panel), and the grand average, collapsed over participants and idioms (right panel). Again, we see a large variation between participants and between items, maybe even more than in the data of Study 1 ( Figure 4 ). The right panel shows the average rating per age, collapsed over participants and idioms. The plot shows an increase in average rating with age until the age of 55, after which the average ratings decrease again. This decrease was not visible in the averages of the data from Study 1. The ratings for each education level and the average age per education level are presented in Table 2 .

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Figure 6 . Average familiarity ratings in study 2. Left: Average familiarity ratings per participant (y-axis) in relation to and the participant's age (x-axis). Center: Average familiarity ratings per idiom (y-axis) per age group (x-axis; in bins of 5 years, and jitter added for presentation purposes). Right: Grand average of familiarity ratings (y-axis) per age group (x-axis; in bins of 5 years).

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Table 2 . Average ratings and average ages per education level in Study 2.

The data of Study 2 were analyzed in the same way as Study 1, using Generalized Additive Mixed Models ( Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990 ; Wood, 2017 ; GAMMs). We included Education and Gender as categorical predictors in the statistical model. Education is a three-level predictor describing the participant's education using the categories “University,” “Vocational education,” and “Other” (collapsing elementary school and high school). Further, we included the covariates Age , the participant's age in years, Frequency , the log-transformed frequency of the idiom, Decomposability , the decomposability scores, and we included as random effects by-participant random smooths over Frequency, by-participant random smooths over Decomposability, and by-idiom random smooths over Age.

The dependent variable is the ratings that participants provided for each idiom on a five-point rating scale (1 being unknown, and 5 being well-known). To account for the non-Gaussian nature of the dependent variable, the model was fitted using the GAMM ordered categorical family, which implements regression for ordered categorical data. As before, the smoothing parameter estimation method fREML was used, because the number of idioms and participants was too large for using ML.

The manual backward-fitting model comparison procedure suggested that the non-linear three-way interaction between Age, Decomposability, and Frequency was not significantly contributing to the model [ χ ( 4 ) 2 = 3.67, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = −0.44; summary statistics: F (6.4, 8111.0) = 1.51; p > 0.1]. The non-linear two-way interaction between Decomposability and Frequency also did not show significance in the model comparison procedure [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 3.11, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = 0.19; summary statistics: F (1.0, 8111.0) = 2.71; p = 0.1]. The interaction between Age and Frequency was significantly contributing to the model [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 5.23, p = 0.015; ΔAIC = 2.69; summary statistics: F (5.9, 8111.0) = 2.41; p = 0.018], and also the interaction between Age and Decomposability [ χ ( 3 ) 2 = 6.25, p = 0.006; ΔAIC = −3.15; summary statistics: F (2.07, 8111.03) = 6.85; p < 0.001]. The categorical predictors Gender [ χ ( 1 ) 2 = 1.11, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = 0.14] and Education [ χ ( 2 ) 2 = 1.30, p > 0.1; ΔAIC = −0.35] did not contribute to the model, and were excluded from the model. The best-fitting model included the non-linear interactions between Age and Frequency and between Age and Decomposability and the non-linear main effects of Age, Frequency, and Decomposability. As a result, we ended with the same specification for the best-fitting GAMM model as in the analysis of Study 1: Rating ~ s(Age) + s(LogFreq) + s(Decomp) + ti(Age, LogFreq) + ti(Age, Decomp) + s(LogFreq, Subject, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1) + s(Decomp, Subject, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1) + s(Age, Sentence, bs = ‘fs’, m = 1), with the last three terms being non-linear random effects. The main effects of Age [ F (3.1, 8106.6) = 6.62; p < 0.001] and Frequency [ F (2.5, 8106.6) = 17.3; p < 0.001] were significantly different from zero, but not the main effect of Decomposability [ F (1.0, 8106.6) = 0.09; p > 0.1].

Figure 7 illustrates the fitted effects estimates of the GAMM analysis of the familiarity ratings of Study 2. The main effects regression line for Age indicates that the ratings increase with age until age 55, and decrease a little for the oldest participants. The oldest participants also show largest uncertainty around the estimates, because there are not many participants around 70. The center panel of Figure 7 shows the interaction between Age and Frequency: idioms with a lower frequency result in lower familiarity ratings than idioms with a higher frequency, but this effect is stronger for young participants. The right panel of Figure 7 shows the interaction between Age and Decomposability. The plot suggests that the decomposability scores influence the familiarity ratings of younger participants (<40 years old), but not of older participants.

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Figure 7 . Fitted effects of GAMM analysis of Study 2. Random effects are set to zero. Left: Estimated effect of Age (with pointwise 95% confidence intervals) for median values of LogFrequency (5.35) and Decomposability (2.35). Age is presented on x-axis, and the estimated familiarity rating on the y-axis. The red horizontal lines indicate the estimated the cut-off points that relate the estimated values to the five response options. Center: Non-linear interaction between Age (x-axis) and Log Frequency (y-axis). The colors and contour lines indicate the value of the estimated ratings (z-axis). Right: Non-linear interaction between Age (x-axis) and Decomposability (y-axis). The colors and contour lines indicate the value of the estimated ratings (z-axis).

Comparison of Study 1 and Study 2

The findings reported both in Study 1 and Study 2 suggest that the familiarity of idioms increases with age, idiom frequency, and decomposability score. To test whether the trends for age, frequency, and decomposability are the same in the two experiments, we compared the estimated effects of the best-fitting models. As we used ordered categorical GAMMs, we cannot compare the model estimates directly. Ordered categorical GAMMs model the effects on a continuous scale and estimate the cut-off points that define the boundaries between the categories on the rating scale. These cut-off points are different for the analysis of Study 1 (−1, 0.14, 1.31, 2.96) and Study 2 (−1, 0.06, 1.13, 2.47). Instead, we can extract from the model the probability of the ordered categorical variable being of the corresponding category, and compare these probabilities ( Wood et al., 2016 ). Figure 8 illustrates the relation between the fitted estimates over Age (summing over all predictors, including the intercept; Left panel), and the probabilities for the dependent variable being in one of the five categories, using the effect of Age in Study 1 (Right panel).

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Figure 8 . The relation between fitted effects excluding random effects (Left) , and the probabilities for the dependent variable being in one of the five categories (Right) . The left panel includes the estimated cut-off points in red.

In the left panel of Figure 9 we (visually) compared the effect of Age on the probabilities for the response variable being rating 4 or 5. To facilitate the comparison we did not include the other three ratings in the plot. The solid lines are the estimated probabilities based on the best-fitting model fitted on the data of Study 1, whereas the dashed red lines are the estimated probabilities based on the best-fitting model fitted on the data of Study 2. Over all ages, the probability of selecting 5 (very well-known) is higher in Study 1 than in Study 2, but the probability of selecting 4 is higher in Study 2 than in Study 1. Thus, irrespective of Age, the idioms in Study 2 are rated as less familiar than the idioms in Study 1. In addition, we see a clear decrease in selecting response option 5 for older adults (> 60 years) in Study 2, but not in Study 1. Important to mention is that these fitted effects are calculated for a median log-frequency (5.48) and a median decomposability score (2.50).

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Figure 9 . Probabilities of the response variable being rating 5 (highly familiar). The probabilities for Studies 1 and 2 are derived from two different statistical models. Random effects are set to 0. Left: Comparing the probabilities of rating 4 and 5 (y-axis) over Age (x-axis) for Studies 1 and 2, with median values for Log Frequency (5.48) and Decomposability (2.50). Center: Effects of Age (x-axis) and Log Frequency (y-axis) on the probability of rating 5 (z-axis) for Study 1 (top) and for Study 2 (bottom) with Decomposability set to a median value (2.50). Right: Effects of Age (x-axis) and Decomposability (y-axis) on the probability of rating 5 (z-axis) for Study 1 (top) and for Study 2 (bottom) with Log Frequency set to a median value (5.48). Note that the age range is smaller for Study 2 than for Study 1.

The center panels of Figure 9 show the estimated probabilities of the response variable being rating 5 for the data of Study 1 (top) and Study 2 (bottom), and how this probability is influenced by Frequency and Age. The contour plot of Study 1 indicates that low frequency idioms (such as the control items, which were translated German idioms that do not exist in Dutch) are unfamiliar for all age groups, as indicated by the green color which is associated with low probabilities and the horizontal contour lines (i.e., no changes in Age, only in frequency). The high frequency idioms on the other hand are rated as being highly familiar by participants older than 30, as indicated by the pink color which marks a probability of 1. These same high frequency idioms show a sharp increase over age in the probability of being rated as 5 for participants under 30 years, as indicated by the vertical contour lines (i.e., no change in frequency, but in age). The contour plot of Study 2 roughly shows similar patterns (increase in probability with Age and Frequency), but the pattern looks more variable. One of the causes of the more variable pattern in Study 2 may be that no control items had been included.

The right panels of Figure 9 shows the estimated probabilities of the response variable being rating 5 for the data of Study 1 (top) and Study 2 (bottom), and how this probability is influenced by Decomposability and Age. The two contour plots show a very similar pattern: idioms that are perceived as highly decomposable, have a higher probability of being rated with a 5 (highly familiar) by young and old participants. Idioms that are perceived as less decomposable, have a lower probability of being rated with a 5 by younger participants (<40 years old). On the basis of visual inspection, it seems that the two studies show a stronger difference in the interaction between Age and Frequency than in the effect of Decomposability.

We explored the variability in idiom knowledge in a large sample of native speakers of Dutch, divided across two separate idiom familiarity studies. Based on findings for single-word vocabulary, and driven by the assumption that idioms (and other multi-word expressions) can be considered entries in the mental lexicon, we expected to find a familiarity curve that shows an early phase of rapid expansion, followed by a long phase of moderate but steady increase across the lifespan. This pattern has been confirmed in both studies. The grand averages show a clear increase in idiom familiarity over age that proceeds until at least 55 years of age.

We also observed a predicted delay in the rise of the idiom vocabulary, compared to single-word acquisition, by about 10 years, as the steep increase in idiom acquisition levels off after 30 years.

The second main factor of interest was idiom frequency. As with single words, the simple rationale is that the more often speakers come across a specific item, the higher the probability of long-term retention. We therefore expected higher ratings for high-frequent idioms. This pattern has been confirmed in both studies, with frequency significantly impacting on the probability of a high familiarity score. While the low frequency items consistently score low in all age groups, the high frequency idioms are rated as being highly familiar by participants older than 30 and show a sharp familiarity increase over age for participants younger than 30 years. Based on Brysbaert et al.'s (2016) findings for the single-word vocabulary, we further expected to find evidence for an effect of education. However, no such effect was found.

As a third factor, we included independent ratings of idiom decomposability, as they might inform us about the way in which item characteristics affect the ease with which idioms are acquired across age. We indeed find that idioms with low decomposability scores are rated as less familiar than items with high decomposability scores, in both studies. However, this effect seems restricted to the younger raters (<40 years old). This suggests that the degree to which the individual words are perceived to contribute to the meaning of the idiom as a whole affects the item's learning trajectory. Decomposable idioms may be more easily acquired than non-decomposable idioms, which could explain why Cain et al. (2005) found that children with poor reading comprehension skills had difficulties interpreting non-decomposable, but not decomposable idioms. Whereas the meaning of decomposable idioms can be derived from the meanings of the idiom constituents, the meaning on non-decomposable idioms has to be learned explicitly. Yet, our findings also suggest that once the item has been acquired, the degree to which it is decomposable no longer affects its perceived familiarity. In this context, it is noteworthy that we deliberately limited the age range of the participants who provided the decomposability ratings (18–25 years), to avoid a possible confound of the ratings with age. An interaction of item decomposability and age has been reported for online processing ( Westbury and Titone, 2011 ). In a follow-up on our study on idiom knowledge, it would be interesting to see to what degree offline decomposability judgements vary with age, as this might further affect the generalizability of many sets of idiom norms.

A comparison of the two studies (two-noun vs. one-noun idioms) revealed that the effects of Age and Frequency on the familiarity judgements in Studies 1 and 2 are roughly similar. The most important difference is a decrease in familiarity for the older participants (> 60 years) in Study 2, but not in Study 1. It is not clear what has caused this difference: The education levels of the older participants are very similar between studies ( Table 3 ), and the predictors Education and Gender did not show an effect on the familiarity ratings in the statistical analyses. However, the number of older participants in Study 2 was much lower than in Study 1, and hence the variation between participants might have had a larger effect than in Study 1. In comparison, the difference in the effects of decomposability is relatively smaller.

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Table 3 . Comparison of the levels of education of the older participants (> 60 years) in Study 1 and in Study 2.

Overall, the pattern of the idiom acquisition curve that we find in the two studies shows that—unlike what is often taken for granted in idiom processing studies—idiom knowledge varies widely between age groups. Especially young adolescents (students) cannot be expected to have developed a large idiom vocabulary yet. This implies that they constitute a relatively unreliable group for testing theories of idiom comprehension and production: they may or may not be familiar with the items, and their representations may be less stable than those of speakers above the age of 30.

A possible explanation for the delay in idiom acquisition (in comparison to that of the single-word lexicon as described by Brysbaert et al., 2016 ) may be found both in the subject and item characteristics. First, idioms are figurative expressions and the ability to handle such expressions successfully only develops at around 9 years of age ( Levorato and Cacciari, 1992 ). Second, idioms often tend to refer to relatively abstract and/or pragmatically complex concepts that may only be grasped well-beyond puberty. A third possibility is that what we observe in our data is in fact an indicator of language change. That is, the younger participants may simply not be familiar with the items because they are no longer being used and/or have been replaced by new idioms. Given the method of item selection (based on examples found in newspaper articles and conversations, but also idiom dictionaries), we do not find this explanation very likely, but we feel that it would be worth exploring in a future study. A methodological challenge will be however that any new idioms that would be expected to replace the old items in the vocabularies of the younger generations will first need to be identified.

At the other end of the distribution, old age, our findings are somewhat inconclusive: do elderly speakers experience problems in accessing items that they used to know before? Based on findings by Kuiper et al. (2009) and Escaip (2015) that showed mixed evidence for a late drop in idiom knowledge, we were especially interested in the category of 65+ participants. While our first study does not show any evidence for such a drop, the second study shows a slight decrease. Yet, the relatively few subjects in these categories and the large variability make it difficult to estimate the reliability of this effect. An additional explanation may be the influence of Frisian in this sample. Although we took care to remove all native speakers of Frisian, it is possible that the remaining participants are also predominantly located in Friesland and therefore come across different idioms in everyday life. For the older participants, this effect may be much stronger, as they can be expected to be less mobile and less exposed to mainstream (Dutch) media. In a future study, we therefore need to include information about the subject's geographical location, about the area in which they grew up, and the type of media that they consume. Ideally, this would be a megastudy comparable to that of Brysbaert et al. (2016) , with a large number of items and a very large and diverse sample of Dutch speakers.

This study provides support for the hypothesis that idiom acquisition is similar to word acquisition, with increasing knowledge across the life span. However, idioms are different from words in that they are multiword expressions, and idioms are different from many other types of multiword expressions in that they have a figurative meaning. It would be interesting to compare the acquisition of idioms with the acquisition of other types of multiword expression to investigate how the ability to understand figurative expressions influences idiom acquisition. Is this a prerequisite for acquiring idioms, as is generally assumed? Or do children acquire high frequent idioms as words, without the ability to understand figurative language? One of the difficulties in investigating these questions is the variability between idioms. Other factors such as concreteness and imageability (both related to the transparency of the idiom) could play a role in whether and how much idioms are being perceived as figurative language. The effects that we find for decomposability support this hypothesis.

Taken together, our findings stress the need for future work to address both item and subject characteristics that could potentially affect idiom acquisition in more detail. Our findings with respect to the effect of decomposability and its interaction with age suggest that this could be a worthwhile enterprise. With respect to other item characteristics, possible candidates are, for example, the above mentioned factors concreteness, transparency, and imageability, but also length, or animacy.

While the idea that idioms differ with respect to item characteristics, such as decomposability, was formulated early on in the idiom literature (e.g., Gibbs and Nayak, 1989 ), the focus on speaker characteristics is relatively new (see also section Introduction). Yet, the idea that successful idiom comprehension depends on individual differences in processing abilities seems relatively straightforward, as idiom comprehension is a complex skill which is only acquired late during acquisition. For example, Cacciari et al. (2018) found a clear relationship between online idiom comprehension and cognitive functions that might extend to idiom acquisition as well, to the extent that it reflects differences in fluid intelligence. On top of that, the personality traits that they found to affect online processing might come into play in acquisition, too. The use of figurative language and other multi-word expressions is an important stylistic device that may be very well-suited to express different types of personality. The factor Age, which has been in the focus of the present article, may thus not only represent a participant's linguistic experience, but also its interaction with age-dependent changes in cognitive control, long-term memory access, and personality. Future studies will need to distinguish these factors on a more fine-grained level.

Are all native speakers alike when it comes to idioms? We have shown that—similar to the single-word vocabulary—the idiom vocabulary differs widely across speakers, with age rather than education being the main factor driving these differences. Are all idioms alike when it comes to the probability of being known by a native speaker? In line with findings on online processing (e.g., Arnon and Snider, 2010 ) we have shown that idioms behave much like ordinary entries in the mental lexicon, in that they are sensitive to distributional information. The more frequent an idiom, the larger the probability that a native speaker is familiar with it. In addition, the probability with which an idiom is acquired is affected by the degree to which it is decomposable. Our findings can help increase the reliability and validity of idiom processing studies. More importantly, we think that they contribute to a clearer picture of the way in which the boundaries of the lexicon expand across the lifespan.

Data Availability

The datasets generated for this study can be found here: https://git.lwp.rug.nl/p251653/development-idiom-knowledge .

Ethics Statement

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Ethical Rules for Conducting Research with Human Participants, Research Ethics Committee Faculty of Arts (CETO), University of Groningen. The protocol for all age groups was approved by the Research Ethics Committee Faculty of Arts (CETO), University of Groningen (60761519). All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. We did not obtain written consent from parents/legal guardians of participants under 16, because participants participated anonymously in the experiment by clicking a link that was posted on social media, the participants were free to stop whenever they wished without consequences (they were not payed or reimbursed for their participation), and the materials of the experiment (officially recognized Dutch idioms) gave no reason to assume that non-adult participants could suffer negative consequences from participating in this study.

Author Contributions

SS and JvR: conceptualization and writing. SS and AlR: materials and data collection. JvR: statistical analyses.

This research was supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (Veni grant no. 275-70-044, JvR; and Ph.D. in the Humanities grant no. 322-75-008, AlR).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord and Peter Kleiweg for their assistance with the search for idioms in the Lassy Large corpus.

1. ^ Supplementary Materials are available at https://git.lwp.rug.nl/p251653/development-idiom-knowledge

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Keywords: idioms, multiword expressions, vocabulary, aging, decomposability, development, familiarity

Citation: Sprenger SA, la Roi A and van Rij J (2019) The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan. Front. Commun. 4:29. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2019.00029

Received: 07 November 2018; Accepted: 04 June 2019; Published: 05 July 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Sprenger, la Roi and van Rij. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Simone A. Sprenger, s.a.sprenger@rug.nl ; Jacolien van Rij, j.c.van.rij@rug.nl

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Teaching idioms in English as a second language : an analysis of issues and solutions

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2021, Blinova, O. (2021) Teaching idioms in English as a second language : an analysis of issues and solutions. INTED2021 Proceedings, pp. 324-328.

Idioms are said to mirror the culture of the language. As it happens with most culturally-determined language aspects, idioms pose great difficulties for learners (Prodromou 2003; Tran, 2012; Vasiljevic, 2011), to the point where some teachers avoid dealing with idioms in the classroom altogether (Tran, 2012). Prodromou (2003) speaks of an "idiomatic paradox", where native speakers rely on idioms in spoken discourse, while even advanced learners struggle, finding them elusive. However, many scholars insist on teaching idioms in an EFL classroom. Celce-Murcia (2008) proposes a communicative competence model, where one of the competences (figurative) rests on the ability to use idioms. CEFR includes idiomatic expressions in its band descriptions (Council of Europe 2012). All this makes a case for including idioms in academic syllabi. The paper explores the reasons why idioms present immense difficulties for learners. I start by reviewing existing scholarly approaches to definitions and taxonomy of idiomatic expressions and proceed to identifying the common issues that EFL learners face. I then outline suggestions to deal with those issues. The latter are based on successful case studies from teaching idioms in EFL classroom to L1 Russian and Turkish speakers.

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The noteworthiness of integrating the teaching of idioms and other fixed expressions through communicative approach has appeared as imperative in the context of scientific fact with an axiomatic value that the main aim of learning a foreign language consists in the formation of communicative competence – the learners’ aptness to understand and produce language in order to communicate successfully. The paper at hand discusses the linguistic and pedagogic implications of teaching idioms and other fixed expressions through communicative approach. Research has revealed that the misuse of idioms and other fixed expressions is the cause of the errors committed in the production of language. What’s more, the errors at the level of idioms and other fixed expressions are universally recognized as the most appropriate indicator of distinguishing amongst natives from the non-native speakers even if the later have a high level of communicative competence in English.

Teaching Idioms in Language Classrooms - Like the Icing on the Cake

Helena Winnberg

This thesis investigates what types of teaching approaches and methods can be used when teaching idiomatic expressions to learners of English. The method used is a small-scale research synthesis where studies are summarized, compared and discussed. An overview of the teaching approaches and methods provide an outline of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach/method in connection to the purpose of teaching idioms to language learners of English. Several different descriptions of idioms are merged into one that is used in this research synthesis. The results indicate that even though teaching procedures appealing to Multiple Intelligences are most common in the articles used for this thesis, there are several different ways to improve learners’ idiom comprehension. Every teacher should have in mind that all students are unique and learn in different ways but some generalizations can be helpful when planning lessons. Keywords: idioms, figurative language, teaching method, teaching approac

International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies

The field of idiomaticity is considered by many researchers as an important area, especially when it comes to L2 and/ or EFL learners. Mastering idioms and the ability to use them in the written and the spoken discourse is considered as a sign towards proficiency. However, it is noticed clearly that there is not much research done in this respect. Lazar (1996) states that figurative language is an area often neglected in the teaching of vocabulary. In this respect, this study was conducted to investigate the difficulties faced by 40 Libyan students in understanding idiomatic expressions. Additionally, it was to shed light on some strategies employed by those students to ease their way in understanding and using idiomatic expressions. The paper aims to investigate problems and difficulties encountered by the Libyan students and strategies used to overcome these problems and difficulties. Keywords: idiomatic expressions, idiomaticity, literal and figurative meaning, Idiom processing strategies

Sakarya University Journal of Education

HARUN BAŞTUĞ

International Journal of Education, Psychology and Counseling

kamariah yunus

Proficiency in figurative language is a challenging aspect of second language acquisition. An essential component of figurative fluency and proficiency is knowledge of idioms. Mastery of these formulaic sequences has been considered as an important indicator of communicative competence, enabling speakers to use the language both fluently and idiomatically. However, learning such essentially perplexing constructs poses a lot of challenges to EFL students, and thus they need to get immersed in language skills provided by teachers. The purpose of language acquisition is to achieve effective communication. Being communicatively competent helps language learners to avoid any kind of breakdown of communication, and therefore reaching fluency is the main goal of EFL learners. Thus, this quantitative study is an attempt to explore the influence of idioms acquisition on enhancing English students&#39; fluency. The study has been carried out with twenty lecturers where a five-point Likert-sca...

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

Zahra Fotovatnia

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Top 20 Commonly Used Idioms for Research Writing

idioms for research writing

In the realm of academic writing, researchers strive to create impactful and persuasive research papers. One powerful tool at their disposal is the use of academic idioms. These idiomatic expressions, when used appropriately, can enhance the clarity, sophistication, and persuasive power of research papers.

In this blog post, we will explore the top 20 idioms commonly used by researchers , providing their definitions and accompanied by examples.

1. “In the realm of”

Definition: Within a particular field or area of study.

Example: “In the realm of neuroscience, this study examines the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive function

2. “Lay the groundwork”

Definition : To establish a foundation or basis for further development.

Example: “This paper lays the groundwork for future research by providing a comprehensive review of existing literature.”

3. “Bridge the gap”

Definition: To connect or reconcile differences between two concepts or ideas.

Example: “This study aims to bridge the gap between theoretical models and practical applications in the field of artificial intelligence.”

4. “Give rise to”

Definition : To cause or initiate something.

Example: “The emergence of new technologies has given rise to innovative approaches in the field of renewable energy.”

5. “Shed light on”

Definition : To provide clarification or understanding about a particular topic.

Example: “This research sheds light on the impact of social media usage on mental health among adolescents.”

6. “Unveil the mysteries”

Definition : To reveal or uncover unknown aspects or secrets.

Example: “Through advanced imaging techniques, this study unveils the mysteries of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

7. “Navigate uncharted waters”

Definition: To explore or deal with unfamiliar or unexplored territory.

Example : “This research navigates uncharted waters by investigating the ethical implications of gene-editing technology.”

8. “Carve out a niche”

Definition: To create a specialized area within a broader field.

Example: “This study carves out a niche by examining the role of mindfulness practices in workplace productivity.”

9. “Pave the way”

Definition : To prepare or facilitate progress or development.

Example: “This research paves the way for future advancements in cancer treatment through its investigation of targeted therapies.”

10. “Break the mould”

Definition : To challenge established norms or conventions.

Example: “This research breaks the mold by proposing a new framework for understanding consumer behavior in the digital age.”

11. “Build on solid foundations”

Definition: To rely on established principles or knowledge

Example: “This paper builds on solid foundations by integrating economic theories with sociological perspectives to analyze income inequality.”

12. “Paint a comprehensive picture”

Definition: To provide a thorough and complete understanding of a subject or phenomenon. Example: “Through extensive data analysis, this study paints a comprehensive picture of climate change impacts on coastal ecosystems.”

13. “Take center stage”

Definition: To assume a prominent or influential position.

Example: “This research takes center stage in the debate on renewable energy policies and their impact on economic growth.”

14. “Push the envelope”

Definition: To go beyond conventional boundaries or limitations.

Example: “This study pushes the envelope by exploring the potential of nanotechnology in drug delivery systems.”

15. “Set the stage”

Definition: To create the necessary conditions or context for something to happen.

Example: “The introduction sets the stage for the subsequent analysis by providing an overview of the research problem and its significance.”

16. “Stand on the shoulders of giants”

Definition : To build upon the achievements or knowledge of those who came before.

Example: “This research stands on the shoulders of giants by incorporating and expanding upon seminal works in the field.”

17. “Plant the seeds”

Definition : To initiate or lay the foundation for future development or growth.

Example: “This study aims to plant the seeds for future research by identifying key research gaps in the field of cybersecurity.”

18. “Hold the key”

Definition: To possess the solution or answer to a particular problem.

Example: “This research holds the key to understanding the genetic factors contributing to the onset of neurological disorders.”

19. “Add fuel to the fire”

Definition: To exacerbate or intensify an existing problem or conflict.

Example: “The controversial findings of this study added fuel to the fire in the ongoing debate surrounding the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture.”

20. “Reap the benefits”

Definition: To enjoy the positive outcomes or rewards of an endeavor.

Example: “By implementing sustainable farming practices, farmers can reap the benefits of increased crop yields and environmental conservation.”

By incorporating these idioms into your research papers, you can enhance the impact and persuasiveness of your writing. However, remember to use them judiciously and in appropriate contexts.

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“Thinking too much”: A Systematic review of a common idiom of distress

Bonnie n. kaiser.

a Department of Anthropology and Department of Epidemiology, Emory University, 1557 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA

Emily E. Haroz

b Center for Refugee and Disaster Response and Applied Mental Health Research Group, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

Brandon A. Kohrt

c Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, 310 Trent Drive, Durham, NC 27710, USA

Paul A. Bolton

Judith k. bass.

d Department of Mental Health and Applied Mental Health Research Group, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 624 N. Broadway, Room 861, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

Devon E. Hinton

e Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, 15 Parkman Street, WACC 812, Boston, MA 02114, USA

Associated Data

Idioms of distress communicate suffering via reference to shared ethnopsychologies, and better understanding of idioms of distress can contribute to effective clinical and public health communication. This systematic review is a qualitative synthesis of “thinking too much” idioms globally, to determine their applicability and variability across cultures. We searched eight databases and retained publications if they included empirical quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research regarding a “thinking too much” idiom and were in English. In total, 138 publications from 1979–2014 met inclusion criteria. We examined the descriptive epidemiology, phenomenology, etiology, and course of “thinking too much” idioms and compared them to psychiatric constructs. “Thinking too much” idioms typically reference ruminative, intrusive, and anxious thoughts and result in a range of perceived complications, physical and mental illnesses, or even death. These idioms appear to have variable overlap with common psychiatric constructs, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD. However, “thinking too much” idioms reflect aspects of experience, distress, and social positioning not captured by psychiatric diagnoses and often show wide within-cultural variation, in addition to between-cultural differences. Taken together, these findings suggest that “thinking too much” should not be interpreted as a gloss for psychiatric disorder nor assumed to be a unitary symptom or syndrome within a culture. We suggest five key ways in which engagement with “thinking too much” idioms can improve global mental health research and interventions: it (1) incorporates a key idiom of distress into measurement and screening to improve validity of efforts at identifying those in need of services and tracking treatment outcomes; (2) facilitates exploration of ethnopsychology in order to bolster cultural appropriateness of interventions; (3) strengthens public health communication to encourage engagement in treatment; (4) reduces stigma by enhancing understanding, promoting treatment-seeking, and avoiding unintentionally contributing to stigmatization; and (5) identifies a key locally salient treatment target.

Introduction

Several decades ago, Nichter (1981) outlined a research agenda that takes idioms of distress as its theoretical object, defining them as “socially and culturally resonant means of experiencing and expressing distress in local worlds” ( Nichter, 2010 , 405). Terms used to describe such experiences or expressions have been alternatively labeled idioms of distress, culture bound syndromes, or cultural syndromes. With the publication of DSM-5, the term cultural concepts of distress has been adopted to refer to “ways that cultural groups experience, understand, and communicate suffering, behavioral problems, or troubling thoughts and emotions” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, 787).

Scholars have suggested that such constructs be incorporated into research and interventions in efforts to better understand forms of suffering; to improve clinical communication, service usage, and treatment outcomes; and to reduce stigma ( Hinton and Lewis-Fernandez 2010 ; Kohrt et al. 2008 ; Kohrt et al., 2010 ; Kleinman, 1988 ). For example, Kohrt et al. (2010) report that in Nepal, NGO and health professionals referred to psychological trauma using terminology that was stigmatizing due to ethnopsychological associations with karma. They suggest that treatment initiatives incorporate idioms of distress, contextualized within Nepali ethnopsychology, to avoid inadvertently stigmatizing mental health patients.

Additionally, researchers have used idioms of distress to develop and adapt locally relevant assessment instruments for use in epidemiological and clinical studies and to guide decisions regarding appropriate treatments and programs ( Betancourt, et al., 2009 ; Haroz et al., 2014 ; Kohrt et al., 2011 ; Verdeli, et al., 2008 ). For example, researchers recognize that using measurement instruments designed to capture DSM or ICD-defined syndromes may result in missing culturally relevant symptoms that are associated with impaired functioning ( Flaherty, et al., 1988 ; Kleinman, 1987 ; Weaver & Kaiser, 2015 ). Some studies have thus drawn on idioms of distress alongside standard measures, making assessment more culturally sensitive ( Hinton et al., 2012c ; Kaiser et al., 2013 ; Weaver & Kaiser, 2015 ). Such an approach proved successful in Sri Lanka, where idioms of distress predicted functional impairment above and beyond a PTSD scale and depression inventory ( Jayawickreme et al., 2012 ).

However, anthropologists have critiqued some applications of idioms of distress, arguing that they are reduced to psychiatric categories in interventions. Unlike psychiatric categories, idioms of distress can communicate suffering that does not reference psychopathological states, instead expressing collective social anxiety, engaging in symbolic protest, or providing “metacommentary on social injustice” ( Abramowitz, 2010 ; De Jong & Reis, 2010 ; Nichter, 2010 , 404; Pedersen et al., 2010 ). Also unlike psychiatric categories, idioms of distress are explicitly situated within a cultural milieu that is recognized to be complex and dynamic ( Briggs et al. 2003 ; Kirmayer & Young, 1998 ; Massé, 2007 ). Considering idioms of distress as communicative tools draws attention to questions of power, such as who defines categories of distress ? and what forms of distress are most relevant in healing contexts ? ( Guarnaccia et al., 2003 ; Kohrt et al., 2014 ).

For anthropologists, much of the value of idioms of distress derives from the way they reflect notions of personhood, local moral worlds, and engagement with social change and struggle, elements that are often disregarded in interventions. Some anthropologists have therefore critiqued psychiatrists and public health practitioners for ignoring this broader context and more nuanced meaning ( Abramowitz, 2010 ; Sakti, 2013 ). Abramowitz presents an example of humanitarian organizations reducing a Liberian cultural syndrome ( Open Mole ) to psychiatric phenomena like PTSD, largely because they more readily fit the organizations’ biomedical epistemology. In this process of translation, organizations ultimately invalidated the narratives of suffering and loss that were being experienced and communicated as Open Mole. In this review, we aim to consider idioms of distress in a way that privileges local meaning while also attending to potential means of informing psychiatric and public health interventions.

To date, the majority of research on idioms of distress has been limited to a specific cultural context. While there is long and ongoing practice of testing applications of psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., DSM and ICD criteria) across cultural populations, there is a gap in the research with regard to examining idioms of distress that may share similarities across cultural groups and settings. The first major attempt to do this was the work of Simons and Hughes (1985) , who developed a taxonomy of culture bound syndromes, which categorized syndromes by the presumed level of biological pathogenicity and the type of symptom clusters. In the past 30 years, there has been a lack of effort to re-examine shared elements of idioms of distress across cultures. We chose to evaluate one previously unexamined category of idioms of distress that appears to be common across cultural groups: thinking too much.

“Thinking too much” idioms have appeared frequently in ethnographic studies of mental distress and represent one of the cultural concepts of distress in DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013: 834). Given that “thinking too much” is often mentioned in studies related to non-European/North American cultures and contexts, we set out to more fully understand the descriptive epidemiology and complex meaning of these idioms in the literature. The current study aimed to systematically review the “thinking too much” literature from several perspectives: (1) to give an overview of studies to date by geographical area and population; (2) to describe and compare the phenomenology, course and consequences, etiology, and vulnerability factors; (3) to examine studies identifying associated psychiatric disorders; and (4) to examine and compare local attempts at coping with these forms of distress. Our goal is to provide an in-depth description and analysis of “thinking too much” idioms in an effort to determine the applicability and variability of this concept across cultures, as well as explore implications for assessment and treatment cross-culturally. The review is particularly timely given the inclusion of “thinking too much” as one of the cultural concepts of distress in DSM-5.

This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines ( Liberati et al., 2009 ). First, we searched eight databases: PubMed, PsychInfo, Web of Science, SCOPUS, Embase, Sociological Abstracts, Anthrosource, and Anthropology Plus with the following search terms: (Anthropology OR Ethnology OR “Cross-Cultural Comparison” OR Ethnopsychology OR “Cultural Characteristics” OR Ethnography OR “cross cultur*” OR “idioms of distress” OR “mental health” OR psychology) and (“Thinking too much” OR “Too much thinking” OR “lots of thinking” OR “lots of thoughts” OR “too many thoughts”). There were no limits in terms of language or publication date on any of the searches. In addition, we searched Google Scholar for the term “thinking too much” and contacted listservs related to medical and psychological anthropology, transcultural psychiatry, and community participatory research to ensure that we had as complete a reference list as possible. Initial publications were collected over a two-week period in November 2012, with a second database search conducted in December 2014. Publications included in the review consisted of articles, book chapters, dissertations, books, unpublished manuscripts, and reports. See Figure 1 for a summary of our search process.

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Flow diagram of systematic review process

Publications were included for full review if they met the following criteria: (1) the publication mentioned “thinking too much” or a closely related idiom in the body of the text, (2) the publication included empirical qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research regarding the idiom, and (3) the publication was in English. Regarding criterion 1, although our database search terms were broader than “thinking too much” (including “too much thinking,” “lots of thinking,” “lots of thoughts,” and “too many thoughts”), this was done in order to be inclusive in our initial search. Review of publications then identified those referencing a relevant idiom. Rather than any reference to troubled cognition or problematic thoughts, the idiom of distress had to include a component of excess or “too much.” For example, a publication mentioning “problems with thoughts” would not be sufficient to meet inclusion criteria. However, when publications that otherwise meet inclusion criteria describe problems with thoughts as part of their characterization of “thinking too much,” we do include such descriptions in our analysis. In our Results, we present English translations of idioms as reported by authors and also include idioms in the original language when possible.

Two steps were taken in reviewing the publications. Initially, titles and abstracts were reviewed to determine whether they met the above criteria. If the title and abstract provided insufficient information to determine whether criteria were met, the publication was retained for full review. Second, the publications were classified as either an “in depth” or a “briefly mentioned” publication. “In depth” publications focused on “thinking too much” as a main focus of the work and generally provided a qualitative description of the idiom’s phenomenology, etiology, and course. “Briefly mentioned” publications mentioned “thinking too much” in the text but did not provide extensive information on the idiom. Authors BNK and EH independently reviewed all publications for inclusion/exclusion and achieved 78% agreement. In cases of disagreement, publications were checked collaboratively and decided by consensus. In addition, the authors reviewed and discussed all eligible publications in order to classify them as “briefly mentioned” or “in depth.”

For coding and analysis, each publication was imported into MaxQDA ( VERBI, 1989–2010 ). Two authors (BNK and EH) coded all of the publications; to increase consistency, BNK coded all “in depth” publications, and EH coded all “briefly mentioned” publications. Coding and analysis focused on (1) descriptive epidemiology, including world region and population; (2) descriptions of “thinking too much,” including phenomenology, course and consequences, etiology and vulnerability groups, and ethnopsychological information that contributes to the understanding of the idiom; (3) comparative diagnoses; and 4) treatment and coping mechanisms associated with the idiom. Coding also included method of elicitation, such as whether “thinking too much” was part of a questionnaire administered by the researchers or whether it emerged during qualitative work and methods for drawing comparison to psychiatric constructs, as well as whether “thinking too much” represented a symptom, syndrome, and/or cause.

A total of 138 articles, books, book chapters, unpublished dissertations and manuscripts, and programmatic reports were included in the final analysis ( Figure 1 ). Of these publications, 61 were classified as “in depth” and 77 as “briefly mentioned.” Publication dates ranged from 1979–2014. See Supplemental Table 1 for a list of all publications [INSERT LINK TO SUPPLEMENTAL TABLE ].

Aim 1. Geographic Locations and Populations

All publications ( n= 138) reported the geographic origin of the study population: Africa ( n= 60, 43.5%), Southeast Asia ( n= 41, 29.7%), Central America/Caribbean ( n= 13, 9.4%), South Asia ( n= 12, 8.7%), United States/Europe ( n= 4, 2.9%), Australia ( n= 4, 2.9%), the Middle East ( n= 3, 2.2%), and South America ( n= 1, 0.7%). A total of 27.5% ( n= 38) included data on refugee or immigrant populations ( Table 1 ).

Number of publications by region and type of population (n=138) a

Publications were classified into several population categories, including n= 63 (45.6%) publications that involved general adult populations of mixed sex, n= 29 (21.0%) that only included women in the samples, and n= 14 (10.2%) that focused on children and adolescents. The other studies involved men only ( n= 4, 2.9%), older adults ( n= 3, 2.2%), health workers ( n= 7, 5.1%) and other or not specified ( n= 18, 13.0%; Table 1 ). Publications that focused on descriptions of idioms by health workers included traditional healers, community health workers, and homecare workers. Table 2 shows the “thinking too much” idioms used across cultural settings.

Idioms used for “thinking too much” across cultural settings

Note: Many publications discussed “thinking too much” but did not provide the idioms in the local language. This table only includes translations of full idioms provided in publications

Aim 2. Comparative description

“thinking too much” as symptom, syndrome, and cause.

“Thinking too much” idioms were analyzed as symptoms, syndromes, and/or causes of distress, depending on the particular cultural and social context. Symptoms were defined as individuals’ reports of their subjective experience; syndromes were defined as the co-occurrence of a group of symptoms that together form the presence of a disease/disorder; and causes were considered to be when individuals attributed their illnesses to “thinking too much” ( Burgur & Neeleman, 2007 ). These categories were not mutually exclusive; publications could be classified as invoking “thinking too much” in relation to symptom, syndrome, and cause. There were n= 48 (34.8%) publications in which “thinking too much” was primarily used as a symptom of a broader mental health syndrome. For example, as Shankar et al. (2006) describe, “The impact of mental illness was seen on the patient through psychological and behavioral symptoms […] such as thinking too much” (p. 226). Similarly, Okello et al. (2012) found that “the most common singular symptom used by participants to characterize depression was rumination about worries or ‘having too many thoughts” (p. 42).

In n= 38 (27.5%) publications “thinking too much” was discussed as itself a mental health related syndrome, or a certain elaborated constellation of symptoms. For example, Bolton et al. (2012) found “thinking too much” described as a syndrome: Moun yo panse anpil (people think a lot), which included symptoms related to difficulty sleeping, chin on palm, and loss of weight/appetite. Baganda men in Uganda also used “thinking too much” as a syndrome when they described what happened after wives leave: “He says ‘I will never have her again’ so he develops the illness of the thoughts as they say… He is thinking a lot” ( Okello & Ekblad, 2006 , 297).

There were n= 27 (19.6%) publications in which “thinking too much” was used as an explanation/cause of either a physical or other mental health problem. In 18 publications (13.0%), “thinking too much” was used in multiple manners (e.g. as a symptom and an explanation/cause; see Figure 2 ). Of these n= 18 publications; n= 8 publications used “thinking too much” as an explanation/cause and syndrome, n= 6 as an explanation/cause and symptom, n= 2 as a syndrome and symptom, and n= 2 as all three. In studies involving Southeast Asia populations, “thinking too much” was frequently used as a syndrome ( n= 19 publications, 46.3% of SE Asia), followed by use as a symptom ( n= 11, 26.8% of SE Asia) or an explanation/cause ( n= 10). In studies based in Africa and South Asia, it was used as a symptom (Africa: n= 24, 40.0% of Africa; South Asia: n= 7, 58.3% or SA) followed by use as a syndrome (Africa: n= 14, 23.3%; South Asia: n= 1, 8.3%) or an explanation/cause (Africa: n= 14, 23.3%; South Asia: n= 3, 25.0%). This variability in basic usage and description of “thinking too much” idioms adds complexity to a cross-cultural comparison of such idioms.

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Use of thinking too much in reviewed publications

Content of “thinking too much”

Descriptions of “thinking too much” idioms included characterizations of rumination and intrusive or obsessive thoughts. Apt metaphors likened “thinking too much” to having thoughts move past like a film reel ( Fenton & Sadiq-Sangster, 1996 ) or a cassette tape “going round and round,” machine-like ( Yarris, 2014 , 489). Other authors likened “thinking too much” idioms to worry or stress. For example, one Quechua man in Peru described such worrying thoughts:

They suffered with pinsamientuwan (worrying thoughts) that they were about to die. Much of their suffering was due to the killing of six of their family members [and] they thought they were about to be killed as well ( Pedersen et al., 2010 , 287).

The content of thoughts differed across studies. In several instances, “thinking too much” was brought about by an accumulation of life problems, such as in Nicaragua and Ghana and among Shan Buddhists ( Avotri, 1997 ; Eberhardt, 2006 ; Yarris, 2014 ). In other cases it consisted of fixation on a single problem, such as in Haiti and among South Asian immigrants in the US ( Kaiser et al. 2014 ; Karasz, 2005a ). Similarly, there was variation in whether thoughts centered on only current concerns or also included past events – such as traumatic experiences or death of a family member – such as reported particularly frequently among Cambodian populations ( D’Avanzo & Barab, 1998 ; Frye, 1995 ; Hinto et al., 2012a ; Hinton et al., 2015 ). Fifteen studies (10.9%) across all world regions linked “thinking too much” idioms to sadness, either as a precipitating factor or as an outcome.

Overall, descriptions suggested that “thinking too much” idioms include phenomena similar to both rumination and worry, with thought content consisting of either present concerns or past experiences, such as trauma, and to a lesser extent future concerns, such as concern for one’s safety.

Symptoms and sequelae of “thinking too much”

Studies reported a range of associated phenomena, including emotional, physiological, and behavioral sequelae of “thinking too much” idioms; forms of functional impairment; and multiple cognitive and somatic symptoms. Across settings, n=21 (15.2% of all studies) associated “thinking too much” idioms with depression-related phenomena including depressed affect, lack of interest in activities, seeming distracted and preoccupied as though one’s mind is elsewhere, and social withdrawal. Such descriptions were found in Sub-Saharan African countries, as well as among Haitians, Inuit, Cambodian refugees, and East Timorese. “Thinking too much” idioms were linked to social isolation and withdrawal in studies from Africa, Haiti, Cambodia, and among Bhutanese and Cambodian refugees in the US. In contrast, a smaller number of studies (n=9, 6.5%) described individuals as having an agitated affect (Thailand: Cassaniti, 2011 ), being panicky (Zimbabwe: Patel et al., 1995 ), irritable (South Sudan: Ventevogel et al., 2013 ), easily angered (Cambodia: Meyer et al., 2014 ), behaving strangely (Ghana; Avotri, 1997 ; Avotri & Walters, 2001 ; Walters et al., 1999 ), or a combination of these (Cambodian refugees in the US: D’Avanzo et al., 1994 ; Hinton et al., 2015 ).

Cognitive sequelae identified in studies included absentmindedness, lack of awareness, and memory loss and were reported particularly among South and Southeast Asian populations and in Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. For example, caregivers of depressive patients in Uganda reported that “thinking too much” resulted in poor concentration, diminished problem-solving, and difficulty sustaining conversation ( Muhwezi et al., 2008 ).

Physical sequelae were common across studies (n=42, 30.4%), including tiredness and trouble sleeping ( n= 25), headache ( n= 22), and loss of appetite ( n= 14). A description from Ghana echoes that seen in many studies regarding trouble sleeping: “I think a lot… in the night too when I go to bed, I can’t sleep. I’ll be turning and turning on my bed… I have observed that it is the thinking that is causing all this sleeplessness” ( Avotri, 1997 , 131). Of the 25 studies reporting trouble sleeping, 14 (56.0%) were from Africa. Of the 22 studies reporting headaches, 10 (45.5%) were from South and Southeast Asian populations. Exhaustion, low energy, and weakness were also reported.

Less common physical symptoms included bodily pains, fever, and more serious sequelae such as chest pain, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, and shortness of breath. Such severe symptoms were reported often among South and Southeast Asian populations, as were reports that “thinking too much” resulted in severe physical disorders like diabetes, heart attack, and stroke. In one study among Turkana women, experience of “thinking too much” was found to be associated with significantly increased salivary cortisol, a hormone that serves as a stress biomarker ( Pike & Williams, 2006 ). Among Cambodians and Cambodian refugees, various physiological and mental disasters were thought to result from “thinking too much,” including insanity, tinnitus, permanent forgetfulness, “dementia,” heart attack, and khyâl attack , a culturally salient syndrome that includes prominent panic-like symptoms such as dizziness, palpitations, and fears of death ( Hinton et al., 2012a ; Hinton et al., 2015 ; Meyer et al., 2014 ).

Overall, “thinking too much” idioms appeared to be commonly characterized as consisting of symptoms typically associated with mood and anxiety disorders, with studies rarely reporting psychotic symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations. “Thinking too much” associated symptomology perhaps suggest locally salient forms of embodied life distress, which can be experienced as more severe in some cultural groups.

Course and functional impairment

Publications included reports of functional impairment associated with “thinking too much,” including impaired social functioning, lack of ability to work, and difficulty competing daily tasks. One participant in Uganda described the link between physical symptoms associated with “thinking too much” and resulting functional outcomes: “I feel pain in all parts of my body. My body is so weak; feel pain in all my bones! I am thinking all the time that I am not able to do even the small things that I would otherwise do” ( Okello et al., 2012 , 41). These forms of functional impairment did not exist in isolation but often co-occurred. For instance, Muhwezi and colleagues (2008) describe the far-reaching impacts of “thinking a lot” across multiple domains:

Symptoms associated with thinking a lot or worrying too much, such as slowness in activity, poor concentration, and persistent fatigue were reported to affect the economic output of the patient. Patients’ inactivity was reported to result in loss of income, which presented hardships to the family. In some cases, family structure and aspects of family functioning like composition, decision making, social interaction, and access to health care had been fundamentally affected by the illness of a family member. (p. 1108)

In terms of course, “thinking too much” idioms were in several instances seen as spectrums, with potential progression to psychosis or other severe conditions ( Kirmayer et al., 2009 ; Le Touze et al., 2005 ; Pedersen et al., 2010 ; Sakti, 2013 ; van de Put & Eisenbruch, 2004 ). A more common finding ( n= 19, 13.8%) was that “thinking too much” can result in more severe mental disorder, typically referred to as “craziness,” “madness,” “insanity” or an equivalent local idiom. Such findings were reported most often in Southeast Asian populations (n=10) and the Caribbean (n=3). In two cases, “thinking too much” idioms were thought to contribute to dementia among Bhutanese and Vietnamese populations living in America ( Chase, 2011 ; Yeo et al., 2002 ). One study reported that among the Inuit, “thinking too much” is sometimes associated with delusions or hallucinations ( Kirmayer et al., 2009 ). In 14 studies (10.1%) across multiple locations, “thinking too much” idioms were believed to potentially result in death, including through suicide. For example, Goodman (2004) describes how Sudanese refugees encouraged each other to suppress thoughts in order to evade death:

Sometimes it was very hard. Whenever I heard about something new it gave me a sickness. Somebody might come and comfort you. They tell you “don’t think about it.” They tell you to forget those things so that you may live. […] If you keep something in your heart you can die of thinking […] So we did this, and that’s how life went. And if they hadn’t advised me, maybe I would have lost my hope and then died also because of thinking those thoughts. (p. 1185)

“Thinking too much” idioms appeared to have a range of associated outcomes, including other physical and mental health syndromes and disorders and even death.

As suggested by the variability in thought content associated with “thinking too much,” perceived etiology of the idioms also differed. It should be clarified that the cause of “thinking too much” may be some combination of having misfortunes to think about or having a mental or physical problem that predisposes to “thinking too much.” In the next section we consider vulnerability.

Approximately one-third ( n= 53, 38.4%) of publications referenced one or more causes for “thinking too much.” A relatively large range of factors were reported to cause “thinking too much.” The most common causes were troubled social relationships ( n= 37, 69.8% of publications referencing causes), economic concerns and structural barriers ( n= 36, 67.9% of causes), adverse past events ( n= 29, 54.7% of causes), and illnesses ( n= 16, 49.1% of causes).

Participants attributed “thinking too much” to a range of social relationship problems. Fifteen studies (40.5% of publications referencing social causes), most of them in Africa, focused on “thinking too much” brought about by a husband’s infidelity, abuse, or lack of support for his wife and children. Several studies in Ghana and Uganda reported “thinking too much” about insecurity in marriage or single parenting ( Avotri, 1997 ; Avotri & Walters, 2001 ; Okello & Ekblad, 2006 ). General lack of social support or passing long periods of time alone was also said to cause “thinking too much” in studies from Africa and Southeast Asia (n=14, 37.8% of social causes). Worrying about children’s safety, education, and health, was another common cause ( n= 15, 40.5% of social causes) across all regions. Several publications involving refugee populations ( n= 7, 18.9% of social causes) found that the strains of living far from family or losing loved ones were distinctive stressors for this population. Similarly, Yarris (2014) describes problems of “thinking too much” among Nicaraguan women experiencing both worry about their daughters who emigrated and profound feelings of abandonment ( Yarris, 2011a ).

Economic and structural barriers were also a common cause of “thinking too much.” Publications included references to poverty, lack of food, unemployment, inability to pay for school fees, costs of healthcare, household financial responsibilities, and debts. Such etiologic factors were shared across all world regions. Several publications ( n= 10, 27.8% of publications referencing economic/structural causes) from various world regions referenced a broader sense of disadvantage, disempowerment, and lack of control brought about by structural inequalities beyond poverty (Australia/South Pacific, Ghana, Haiti, Inuit, Nicaragua, and Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the US). For example, Brown and colleagues (2012) found that Australian Aboriginal men describe “thinking too much” and depressive symptoms as caused by:

The pervasive and cumulative impact of chronic stress, the experience of socioeconomic disadvantage, and the down-stream impact of colonisation, through the lived experience of oppression and rapid and severe socio-cultural change […] This was experienced as forced and painful separation from the fundamental essential elements of Aboriginal life and Aboriginal ways of being (p. 103).

A subset of publications mentioned the particular difficulties faced by refugees, including cultural and language differences, marginalization, and lack of ability to pursue a career. Although most etiologic factors in this category were clearly driven by dynamics outside individuals’ control, publications from Haiti, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand reported that it is lack of ability to live up to one’s potential or achieve the life they imagine that proves particularly troubling ( Hinton & Earnest, 2010 ; Kaiser et al., 2014 ; Muecke, 1994 ; Yarris, 2014 ).

Another frequently named cause of “thinking too much” was adverse past events (n=29, 54.7% of causes). These references were particularly common in studies based in Southeast Asia, especially among Cambodian populations who reported ruminating on their experiences during the Pol Pot years ( D’Avanzo & Barab, 1998 ; Eisenbruch, 1992 ; Frye & D’Avanzo, 1994a ; Hinton et al., 2012a ; Hinton et al., 2015 ). Death, particularly of a family member or that occurred suddenly or unexpectedly, also caused “thinking too much” ( n= 15, 51.7% of publications referencing adverse past events as causes). However, attributing “thinking too much” to adverse past events alone can be an oversimplification. For example, Sakti (2013) explains that a massacre in Timor Leste caused “thinking too much” via ongoing disruption of social relationships and typical channels of reconciliation.

Approximately one-third of publications referencing a specific etiology named illness as an important cause of “thinking too much.” While most of these instances referenced one’s own illness, many participants in African studies reported “thinking too much” about the illness of a parent, child, or other close relative. When a specific illness was named, it was typically HIV/AIDS ( n =9, 56.3% of publications referencing illness causes).

In addition to these shared etiologic factors, there were also causes particular to certain studies. These causes ranged from witchcraft and spirits ( Abbo et al., 2008 ; Okello & Ekblad, 2006 ) to substance abuse ( Mains et al., 2013 ; Muhwezi et al., 2008 ) and worry about work-related concerns ( Muhwezi et al., 2008 ). One author reported, “People may even ruminate about how they ruminate too much” ( Hollan & Wellenkamp, 1994 , 177).

Vulnerability factors

Fewer than 10% of studies specifically mentioned sub-populations at greater risk of “thinking too much.” Those that did were largely focused on women as a risk group. This risk was often attributed to financial dependence, oppression, and social status – exposures that make women vulnerable to the primary etiologic factors of “thinking too much.” In one study in Thailand, women were thought to be physiologically prone to “thinking too much” ( Muecke, 1994 ). However, Muecke argues that women are instead vulnerable to such experiences due to their social and gendered positions. While men and wealthy and educated individuals are socialized to practice khit pen meditation – believed to be particularly effective against “thinking too much” – for poor women, this practice is not readily accessible. In various studies, other vulnerable populations included poor, unemployed, less educated, rural, or elderly individuals.

Despite the emphasis on vulnerable sub-populations, Mains (2011) indicates that in Ethiopia it is particularly common among young, urban males. This population has their basic needs met, and – unlike their female counterparts – they are not burdened with household tasks, leaving them with ample free time to ruminate. Few publications adopted such a focus on men, making it difficult to assess whether women are indeed particularly vulnerable or are simply a more common focus of studies. Publications would suggest that the cause of “thinking too much” may vary, suggesting different paths to “thinking too much,” such as poverty, experiencing adverse events in the past, endemic relationship violence, or general livelihood insecurity, and that sometimes all such paths are present in a particular case.

Aim 3: Associated psychiatric constructs

When “thinking too much” was presented in association with psychiatric constructs, the ways that authors arrived at these comparative diagnoses differed widely. These methodological and analytic differences complicate cross-cultural comparison of “thinking too much” idioms to psychiatric categories.

Most studies did not draw on clinical diagnosis or screening instruments but highlighted descriptive similarities between symptoms of “thinking too much” idioms and DSM criteria. Almost all descriptive comparisons were to general distress ( n= 36, 26.1%) or major depressive disorder ( n= 36, 26.1%), with authors stressing symptoms such as loss of purpose or self-worth, loss of pleasure, sadness, decreased social interaction, trouble sleeping, and appetite loss ( Figure 3 ). Studies also drew links to anxiety disorders ( n= 4 generalized anxiety; n= 1 generalized anxiety & PTSD; n= 39 mix of depression and anxiety disorders; see Figure 3 ), indicating that “thinking too much” is linked to ruminative worry, panic attacks, and problems thinking and sleeping ( Hinton et al., 2013 ). Rasmussen and colleagues (2011) likened “thinking too much” among Darfur refugees to the rumination or intrusive thoughts characteristic of PTSD. However, several studies highlighted distinctions between “thinking too much” and DSM criteria and advised caution in drawing connections between the two ( Lackey, 2008 ; Okello et al., 2012 ; Rasmussen et al., 2011 ; Sakti, 2013 ). For example, Okello et al. (2012) noted that rumination associated with “thinking too much” was not focused on sad mood or anhedonia as conceptualized in clinical depression.

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Association of thinking too much and psychiatric constructs by publication

Another common way that “thinking too much” was linked to psychiatric diagnoses was through the use of case vignettes . Researchers constructed vignettes to depict DSM disorders, with the aim of eliciting local terminology and etiology. Vignettes that were labeled as “thinking too much” by participants were typically about depression ( Abbo, 2011 ; Karasz, 2005b ; Niemi et al., s2010 ; Okello & Ekblad, 2006 ; Patel et al., 1995 ), though vignettes about psychotic depression ( Abbo et al., 2008 ), adjustment disorder with depressed mood ( Okello & Ekblad, 2006 ), somatization ( Sorsdahl et al., 2010 ), and schizophrenia ( Sorsdahl et al., 2010 ) were also sometimes termed “thinking too much.” In other cases, vignettes that were attributed to “thinking too much” were considered not to represent illnesses per se but merely “problems” ( Muga & Jenkins, 2008 ; Sorsdahl et al., 2010 ).

Other studies indicated that participants themselves related “thinking too much” to depression, though it was often unclear whether this referred to the psychiatric construct or to a more idiomatic expression ( Avotri, 1997 ; Brown et al., 2012 ; Kirmayer et al., 2009 ; Yarris, 2014 ). Martinez et al. (2011) note that Latino immigrants in the US often named “thinking too much” as a symptom of depression, while Hunleth (2011) found that in Zambia “thinking too much” is thought to lead to depression. Fenton and Sadiq-Sangster (1996) report that among South Asian women in Britain, few of their participants used the term depression, sometimes indicating that it was a term that doctors used.

Approximately one-fifth of studies involving a comparison to psychiatric diagnoses used a screening instrument and drew either descriptive or quantitative links to “thinking too much.” For example, participants in Indonesia meeting clinical cut-offs for depression ( Andajani-Sutjahjo et al., 2007 ) or with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety ( Bass et al., 2012 ) were either locally- or self-identified as experiencing “thinking too much” or described their condition as such. Others found that scores on depression and anxiety screeners were significantly higher among those endorsing “thinking too much” ( Kaiser et al., 2015 ; Patel et al., 1995 ). Miller and colleagues (2006) found that in a factor analysis of the locally-developed Afghan Symptom Checklist, “thinking too much” loaded strongly on the same factor as depression symptoms such as feeling hopeless, sad, and irritable. Finally, Hinton and colleagues (2012a ; 2013 ; 2015 ) found “thinking too much” to be one of the best differentiators among three levels of PTSD severity as measured using the PTSD Symptom Checklist.

In the few studies involving participants clinically diagnosed with depression, “thinking too much” was frequently used to describe their illness ( Abdul Kadir & Bifulco, 2010 ; Okello et al., 2012 ; Parker et al., 2001 ; Patel & Mann, 1997 ), was named as a primary cause ( Ilechukwu, 1988 ), or was endorsed significantly more by depressed than non-depressed individuals ( Rasmussen et al., 2015 ). Of the studies that named one or more comparative psychiatric diagnoses, approximately one-fifth provided no further explanation or justification for the comparison.

In summary, in the majority of publications in which “thinking too much” was referenced in relation to a psychiatric category, common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD or general psychological distress were most frequently mentioned ( n= 36 publications, 73.5% of publications referencing psychiatric category). In n= 9 publications (18.6%), “thinking too much” was associated with a serious psychiatric condition or psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychosis. In n= 38 publications (77.6%), the idiom was associated with multiple, comorbid psychiatric constructs. However, it is difficult to compare across studies, as evidence brought to bear on these associations differed widely, and most were based on authors’ descriptive comparisons.

Aim 4: Treatment and coping

“thinking too much” in the context of cultural ideals and ways of coping.

Several authors described perceptions of “thinking too much” as situated within a particular worldview of ideal or valued states of mind, which is relevant for understanding treatment and coping. For example, Yarris (2014) argues that “thinking too much” reflected a failure to achieve the moral ideal of solidarity. Additionally, publications reported that people should have control over their thoughts; those who do not are considered weak. The majority of such studies were based on Southeast Asian populations, with frequent reference to Buddhist principles to explain such views. Those who experience “thinking too much” were often regarded negatively, as being spiritually weak, unskilled at decision-making, and overly serious ( Cassaniti, 2011 ; Eberhardt, 2006 ; Merkel, 1996 ). For example, Merkel describes how “thinking too much” was situated in a broader value system among Vietnamese refugees in the United States:

The cultural ideal of spiritual and psychological well-being is the ability to maintain stoic equanimity in the face of adversity, to act virtuously and unselfishly, controlling one’s passions and emotions […] The complaint of nghinhieu qua, “thinking too much,” is therefore a serious complaint, implying loss of ability to maintain internal harmony ( Merkel, 1996 , 1272).

“Thinking too much” was also viewed as being discouraged in Buddhism because it represents a form of attachment and an attempt to control one’s karma. Rather, individuals should strive for acceptance of one’s fate, mortality, and impermanence ( Lewis, 2013 ). In fact, Hinton and colleagues argue that among Cambodian refugees, “thinking a lot” is the appositive of the Buddhist ideal of focused mind characteristic of mindfulness and meditation. Eberhardt (2006) reports a similar viewpoint among Shan Buddhists: reflecting on broader cosmology and one’s impermanence was encouraged, whereas thinking about specific, local problems was problematic. A final reason that “thinking too much” was particularly discouraged in these populations was a belief regarding one’s relation to others: it is believed that everyone suffers, so one should not talk about his/her specific problems ( van de Put & Eisenbruch, 2004 ).

While “thinking too much” was often stigmatized in populations centered on Buddhist moral tenets, in other settings the idiom was considered less stigmatizing than certain other mental disorders ( Eberhardt, 2006 ; Le Touze et al., 2005 ; Muecke, 1994 ). In some cases, “thinking too much” represented a potentially valuable locus for intervention before one progresses to more severe – and highly stigmatized – disorder ( Chase, 2011 ; Kaiser et al., 2014 ), and being visited by a lay health worker for “thinking too much” was considered non-stigmatizing ( Chibanda et al., 2011 ). Such mixed findings demonstrate the importance of situating “thinking too much” and other idioms within their broader ethnopsychological contexts. These examples also contribute to understanding how idioms of distress might help alleviate stigma produced by other forms of mental health communication.

Treatment and coping

Treatments in the form of medication or biomedical therapy were rarely mentioned in relation to “thinking too much.” Several studies reported that medications were believed to be ineffective or that participants were specifically told to stop medication use ( Abdul Kadir & Bifulco, 2010 ; D’Avanzo et al., 1994 ; Fenton & Sadiq-Sangster, 1996 ; Hollan & Wellenkamp, 1994 ). Similarly, whereas some participants reported improvement after visiting a doctor ( Bolton et al., 2012 ; Muhwezi et al., 2008 ), other studies included local perceptions that medical care is unnecessary or inadequate or that mental healthcare is highly stigmatized and thus avoided ( Frye & D’Avanzo, 1994b ; Yarris, 2014 ). When treatment was suggested among lay participants, it typically included symptom management, such as taking sleeping pills and pain killers. In Uganda, anti-depressants were found to decrease participants’ experience of “thinking too much” ( Okello et al., 2012 ).

Rituals, teas, and traditional medicines were in some studies reported as preferred treatment modalities ( Abbo et al., 2008 ; Muecke, 1994 ; Sakti, 2013 ; White, 2004 ). Westermeyer (1979) describes Lao ceremonies to retrieve lost souls that were performed “just in case” of supernatural causation; however, these ceremonies were ultimately seen as ineffective because they did not result in recovery.

Efforts to engage in culturally appropriate coping strategies were specified in approximately one-quarter of studies. The most frequently cited coping strategy – referenced in over half of these studies – was to control or suppress one’s thoughts. In particular, several studies reported prescriptions against thinking about the dead or potential problems, as such thoughts are believed to bring trouble on oneself or others ( Avotri, 1997 ; Eberhardt, 2006 ; Nepveux, 2009 ). Although commonly named, it was unclear how effective this technique was. For example, Goodman (2004) reports that Sudanese refugees in the US avoided short-term problems by suppressing thoughts of traumatic events, but this was not seen as an effective long-term strategy. Similarly, one participant compared the suggestion to avoid troubling thoughts to being told “don’t be ill, stop being ill” ( Fenton & Sadiq-Sangster, 1996 , 76). Other suggestions focused on calming oneself, whether through meditation, relaxation, or quiet time to work through one’s problems.

One-third of the studies included reports that alone time only exacerbated “thinking too much.” Instead, participants preferred to busy themselves through activities and social interaction. Although a small number of studies reported use of substances (e.g. alcohol, khat , and other street drugs) to distract oneself from life problems or pass the time ( Avotri, 1997 ; Bolton et al., 2012 ; Mains et al., 2013 ), other studies specifically reported taboos against the use of alcohol and drugs by individuals who are “thinking too much” ( D’Avanzo et al., 1994 ; Frye & D’Avanzo, 1994a ; Frye & McGill, 1993 ).

Seeking out social support from family or community members was recommended by participants in approximately 60% of studies. Talking about their problems or receiving informal counseling and advice was beneficial. Caregivers reported providing encouragement and laughter more so than specific advice. Seeking out religious leaders, such as pastors, Buddhist monks, or church prayer groups, was reported across many settings but was a particularly common recommendation in studies in Uganda. Okello and Ekblad (2006) argue that being prayed over in a communal church setting specifically helped counteract the social isolation typical of “thinking too much.” Others reported that trusting in God and attending to one’s spiritual needs were beneficial, whether in a social capacity or not. Two cases reported that being around community members is helpful, but actually talking about problems can be harmful, as it can bring misfortune to others ( Nepveux, 2009 ; Roberts et al., 2009 ).

In just under one-fifth of studies, participants stated that the only way to improve “thinking too much” is to address the underlying causes; for example, improvements would only come about through resolving life problems, such as having employment, improved healthcare, resolution of ongoing war, and other improvements in sociopolitical conditions. Indeed, in one study in Haiti ( Kaiser et al., 2014 ), coping strategies focused on distraction were perceived to be successful only for those without enduring economic problems. Yarris (2014) also found that “thinking too much” – linked as it is to immutable, troubling socio-economic arrangements – was seen as chronic unless circumstances changed.

In summary, several coping strategies were commonly perceived as effective across studies, including controlling or suppressing thoughts, distraction, and engaging in social activities, and social support was found to be important in a majority of studies.

Summary of findings

The specific aims of this review were to (1) provide an overview of the geographical areas and study populations where “thinking too much” has been studied; (2) describe the phenomenology, course, and vulnerability factors associated with these idioms; (3) examine comparisons of “thinking too much” to DSM disorders; and (4) characterize local forms of coping with “thinking too much.” We found that in general “thinking too much” idioms are used across all major world regions. “Thinking too much” idioms typically referenced rumination, worry, and/or intrusive thoughts, though content of thoughts varied widely both across and within settings. Symptoms associated with these idioms most commonly included social isolation/withdrawal, depressed mood, lack of interest, absentmindedness, memory loss, poor concentration, tiredness, sleep problems, headaches, loss of appetite, and impaired ability to function in work and family life. Perceived etiology included social relationships, economic and structural barriers, traumatic events, and illnesses. Women were commonly identified as being more likely to experience “thinking too much” and its related sequelae. “Thinking too much” was often studied in comparison with depression, as well as anxiety and PTSD. However, the varied methodological approaches taken by authors in drawing such comparisons complicate cross-study comparison. Finally, the most commonly mentioned coping strategy was controlling or suppressing thoughts, and seeking social support was widely recommended. Formal treatments or medications for “thinking too much” have rarely been studied.

Idioms of distress and their implications

“Thinking too much” overlaps with symptoms represented in European/North American psychiatric nosology, such as rumination, perseveration, and worry. However, neither within nor across cultures did “thinking too much” idioms function as synonymous with a single psychiatric construct. Indeed, our findings suggest that there is potential harm associated with reducing these idioms to a single, closest psychiatric diagnosis. In our review, “thinking too much” idioms were found to more saliently communicate distress, as they reference locally meaningful ethnopsychological constructs, value systems, and social structures. In fact, Hinton and colleagues (2015a) argue that “thinking a lot” better predicts PTSD than individual DSM-5 symptoms: “Thus, not assessing “thinking a lot” among Cambodian refugees and other populations results in poor content validity for the trauma construct” (p. 13).

Furthermore, whenever “thinking too much” and psychiatric terms were discussed in relation to stigma, the idioms were considered less stigmatizing. Such findings suggest that drawing on “thinking too much” idioms – rather than displacing them with psychiatric constructs – could prove beneficial for stigma reduction, clinical communication, and therapeutic intervention. “Thinking too much” idioms and psychiatric diagnoses appear to perform different functions within health systems; idioms have great potential for social and communicative aspects of health exchange but not diagnostic specificity. Similarly, psychiatric diagnoses ideally serve the purpose of reliable and accurate identification of distress and selection of treatment regimens, but psychiatric labels have significant limitations with regard to health communication in global mental health.

Several of the studies in this review suggest that there are particular benefits to combining emic (e.g. idioms of distress) and etic (e.g. DSM) perspectives in mental health communication and measurement. Research from a psychiatric epidemiologic approach has demonstrated the utility of DSM categories for measuring the burden of psychiatric illness around the world, such as in the Global Burden of Disease studies ( Murray, et al., 2013 ). Such research can contribute to building an evidence base for global mental health, facilitate cross-cultural communication about prevalences and areas of need, and substantiate calls for increased attention and funding for mental health. At the same time, utilizing a purely etic approach and overlooking local idioms of distress can underestimate local burden of disease and impose the assumption that European/North American concepts of disease and illness are relevant in all contexts ( Weaver & Kaiser, 2015 ).

What has resulted from debates between universalist/particularistic or etic/emic approaches in global mental health has been an attempt to reconcile aims of cross-cultural communication and ethnographic validity via a hybrid approach ( Draguns & Tanaka-Matsumi, 2003 ; Weaver & Kaiser, 2015 ). This approach recognizes that although symptoms and syndromes in the DSM have been identified in many cultures around the world, it is crucial to examine the local shaping and presentation of distress and disorders ( Hinton & Lewis-Fernández, 2011 ; Simons & Hughes, 1985 ), ultimately recognizing that measurement and communication that draw on both etic and emic categories can achieve complementary goals. Researchers have used such a hybrid approach to develop and adapt locally relevant assessment instruments for use in epidemiological and clinical studies, to facilitate clinical communication, and to guide decisions regarding appropriate treatments and programs ( Betancourt, et al., 2009 ; Haroz, et al., 2014 ; Hinton, et al., 2012a , b ; Kaiser et al., 2013 ; Kaiser et al. 2015 ; Kohrt, et al., 2011 ; Verdeli, et al., 2008 ).

Idioms of distress have often been key to these emic/etic approaches to bolstering clinical communication and measurement. For example, Miller and colleagues (2006) used “quick ethnography” to develop the Afghan Symptom Checklist (ASCL), which drew on idioms of distress including “thinking too much.” Rasmussen and colleagues (2014) then compared the locally-developed ASCL to the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20). They found that the SRQ-20 failed to capture aggression and dysphoria, elements of mental distress that were particularly locally salient. Additionally, salience of the measures differed by gender. Including emic measures alongside established cross-cultural tools thus provided a more holistic, locally salient approach to assessing distress. Similarly, Hinton and colleagues (2012a , b , 2013 , 2015 ) found “thinking a lot” to be a key domain of evaluation and treatment among Cambodian refugees and thus advocate incorporating the idiom into routine screening and intervention.

Idioms of distress communicate powerfully in part because they draw on shared understandings of ethnopsychology, cultural history, and linguistic meaning systems. For example, in a study about South Asian women in Britain, the term “thinking and thinking” is almost always accompanied by references to dil (the heart). This idiom thus communicates the centrality of the heart-mind to interconnected thoughts and feelings, distinguishing “thinking and thinking” from everyday thoughts ( Fenton & Sadiq-Sangster, 1996 ). Other studies of South Asian populations have similarly related “thinking too much” to the heart-mind, which contrasts with cognitive-emotional processes that are centered in other aspects of ethnophysiology ( Desjarlais, 1992 ; Kohrt et al., 2008 ). Other authors indicate that “thinking too much” idioms linguistically communicate something other than typical, everyday thoughts. Weiss (2005) describes the term mawazo as indicating active, embodied thought, with similar terms existing in Amharic, Haya, and Swahili ( Mains, 2011 ; Weiss, 2005 ). Such linguistic and ethnopsychological significance would suggest that there is value in preserving idioms of distress in clinical and public health communication.

At the same time, because “thinking too much” idioms – like other idioms of distress – can communicate suffering that is non-pathological, they should not be taken to imply a need for mental health treatment in all cases. For example, in her examination of pensando mucho (thinking too much) in Nicaragua, Yarris (2014) found that the idiom communicates a certain moral ambivalence in the context of transformed social lives. Yarris’s broader study (2011b) explored experiences of grandmothers caring for their migrant daughters’ children. While on the one hand appreciative of economic remittances, grandmothers nevertheless struggled with both persistent worry regarding daughters’ safety, as well as feelings of abandonment, judging the remittances to be “morally insufficient to make up for mothers’ absences” ( Yarris, 2014 , 481). Ultimately, their experiences of “thinking too much” and its embodiment as dolor de celebro (brainache) reflect failure to achieve moral ideals of unity and solidarity within the family. In a similar vein, Sakti’s (2013) study of “thinking too much” in Timor-Leste suggests that psychiatric intervention would be insufficient. She describes that biomedical practitioners often interpret hanoin barak (thinking too much) as a reaction to traumatic events, in particular the 1999 Passabe massacre. However, in her ethnographic study, she finds that “thinking too much” is driven not by individual traumatic events but by the disruption of typical channels of communication and reconciliation among closely related kin groups, which produces ongoing social rupture. In this case, social interventions informed by ethnographic context would likely be more successful than individual psychiatric treatment aimed at PTSD. Like other anthropological studies of idioms of distress, Yarris and Sakti’s extended examinations of “thinking too much” in socio-cultural and political perspective reveal the broader significance that is being communicated, yet is potentially missed, invalidated, or even exploited through the adoption of narrower psychiatric interpretation and response. Investigation of “thinking too much” idioms should thus remain open to the possibility that they communicate non-pathological distress – including collective social anxiety or symbolic protest ( Abramowitz, 2010 ; De Jong & Reis, 2010 ; Nichter, 2010 ; Pedersen et al., 2010 ) – that would suggest a need for social, political, and economic reform more so than psychiatric intervention.

This review reveals further recommendations regarding what should not be done in global mental health intervention. For example, our findings suggest that categorization into etiology, symptom, and syndrome is likely an artifact of the researcher’s perspective rather than distinct categories of “thinking too much.” For most presentations cross-culturally, “thinking too much” appears to have aspects of all of these but is not reducible to any one categorization. The most problematic label in categorizing thinking too much is “syndrome.” The heterogeneity within and across cultures in interpretation and manifestation of “thinking too much” suggest that it should not be referred to as a “syndrome.” Instead, the flexibility of the term and its context-dependent meaning is what confers the potential for it to be less stigmatizing than psychiatric labels. Similarly, “thinking too much” should not be considered as a cultural gloss for common mental disorders in general or specific depressive, anxiety, or trauma-related disorders. This raises the potential for biomedical reification and pathologizing of what is a general category of distress that ranges from normative experience to severe forms of suffering.

Ultimately, while “thinking too much” might be a starting point for incorporating lessons learned in other cultural contexts into European/North American psychiatry, it is important to recognize that “thinking too much” idioms represents heterogeneous lay categories rather than a single construct. The complexity inherent in these idioms of distress, both within and across contexts, should thus be recognized and preserved.

Limitations

There are several limitations to this systematic review. First, we did not systematically search for non-English language publications or studies in the gray literature, which could have yielded a larger number of studies from a wider range of study settings. We also excluded closely-related idioms such as “brain fag,” “excessive thinking,” “over thinking,” and other idioms related to boredom and studying (e.g. Durst et al., 1993 ; Ferzacca, 2002 ; Fisher, 1985 ; Jervis et al., 2003 ; Ola et al., 2009 ; Prince, 1960 ; Yang et al., 2010 ). Several publications reported on studies by the same research team, potentially resulting in “double counting” the same reported data. In many of these cases, it was not possible to fully determine whether information came from the same study population due to analyses of subsamples, mixing of qualitative and quantitative samples, and use of illustrative qualitative examples for interpretation of results without specification of the qualitative sample. We have tried to note where suspected “double counting” may have occurred in the supplemental table . Ultimately, because the goal of this review is to provide a qualitative synthesis, we chose to err toward being overinclusive of publications. Moreover, we chose not to conduct inferential statistical analyses, which would have been biased by possible double counting.

In addition, we did not formally establish inter-coder agreement before systematically coding publications. Formal calculations of inter-coder agreement are not always done with qualitative research ( Armstrong, Gosling, Weinman & Marteau, 1997 ), and in some cases discussions between coders, rather than a statistical calculation of agreement, can be most beneficial ( Barbour 2001 ). While the final application of the codes was done independently, the authors worked closely together to develop the codebook, practice coding, and discuss any disagreements in application of codes.

There was wide variability across publications in terms of amount and type of information provided regarding “thinking too much” idioms; for example, only ten percent of studies included any information regarding risk groups. It is thus difficult to determine how representative some elements of our review are in terms of the full range of “thinking too much” idioms. Moreover, information about “thinking too much” arose differently across studies: some authors elicited information about “thinking too much,” while in others, “thinking too much” idioms arose organically during general discussion of mental distress. Such differences in data collection strategies make it difficult to compare how significant “thinking too much” idioms are across settings. Moreover, as mentioned above, variation in study methods resulted in a lack of consistency for whether “thinking too much” idioms were defined as symptoms, syndromes, or causes. However, as indicated above, such variation in part reflects the complexity of these idioms, which cannot be reduced to a single, homogenous construct.

We call for future research that examines “thinking too much” idioms in a more rigorous and nuanced way, with attention to distinguishing potentially pathological forms of suffering that might require clinical intervention from non-pathological forms of distress that might call for other types of intervention. In addition, we suggest attending to whether certain population sub-groups are considered particularly vulnerable to “thinking too much.” Ethnographic research is informative here because it facilitates the identification of cultural concepts of distress that communicate the complex etiology, meaning, and response surrounding forms of suffering ( Hinton & Lewis-Fernandez 2010 ; Kohrt et al. 2010 ; Nichter 1981 ; Rubel 1964 ). In addition, this initial qualitative synthesis of the literature can provide the foundation for future hypothesis-driven inferential testing of existing studies while keeping in mind potential biases in the literature and limitations for meta-analyses that can be drawn from this qualitative description.

This systematic review found that “thinking too much” idioms of distress are common worldwide and show consistencies in phenomenology, etiology, and effective coping strategies. “Thinking too much” idioms cannot be reduced to any one psychiatric construct; in fact, they appear to overlap with phenomena across multiple psychiatric categories, as well as reflecting aspects of experience not reducible to psychiatric symptoms or disorders, such as socioeconomic vulnerability. Because of the nature of “thinking too much” idioms as something that appears to be both universal in regard to a reflection of distress and also non-specific with regard to any single disorder, they hold great potential to be a less-stigmatizing facilitators of screening, treatment adaptation, psychoeducation, and treatment evaluation. However, recognizing idioms of distress as communicative tools that can reference pathological or non-pathological distress, it is vital to incorporate a locally nuanced understanding of the idiom into potential interventions.

Based on these findings, there are several ways in which considering “thinking too much” and other idioms in their own right can improve mental health outcomes. First, such idioms should be incorporated into measurement and screening, as they provide ideal means of identifying those in need of services, as well as tracking outcomes of treatment that are personally and culturally salient ( Hinton & Lewis-Fernandez, 2010 ; Kohrt et al., 2014 ). Second, such idioms of distress can be used as an entry point for exploring ethnopsychology, which in turn can inform culturally appropriate interventions ( Hinton et al., 2012b ). For example, numerous successful global mental health trials have shown increased feasibility and acceptability by framing interventions in the context of locally acceptable, non-pathological terms for distress ( Patel et al., 2011 ). Such approaches have shown success in multiple settings ( Kohrt et al., 2011 ; Hinton et al., 2012c ). Third, idioms of distress should be incorporated into public health communication and stigma reduction activities in order to enhance understanding, promote treatment-seeking, and avoid unintentionally contributing to stigmatization. And fourth, “thinking too much” should be considered as a treatment target, as it seems to be a central nexus often involving social distress that gives rise to psychological and somatic distress and brings about certain local means of help seeking. However, due in large part to the heterogeneity of “thinking too much” idioms, no single treatment modality is recommended. Future research should explore both clinical and non-clinical forms of treatment, including traditional healing and social interventions, that have successfully addressed “thinking too much.” Ideally, local means of responding to “thinking too much” can be investigated and incorporated into treatment when possible, such as mindfulness meditation in Buddhist contexts ( Hinton, et al., 2012b ).

“Thinking too much” is an exemplar idiom of distress that has great potential to improve acceptability, feasibility, and efficacy of mental health interventions. It is key avenue to understanding local conceptualizations and experiences of distress, and this knowledge can be used to prevent and address general psychological distress, as we have outlined. In cultural contexts where it is found, we advocate “thinking too much” be assessed and tracked in any evaluation or treatment dealing with psychopathology, and that it be incorporated into public health interventions.

Research Highlights

  • Presents first cross-cultural review of the idiom of distress “thinking too much”
  • “Thinking too much” idioms are nearly universal yet heterogeneous across settings
  • They reference a range of pathological/non-pathological states, not a single psychiatric construct
  • They have been used successfully to strengthen measurement scales and clinical interventions
  • We highlight strong examples of balancing emic and etic approaches to understanding distress

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgments.

The authors are grateful to Craig Hadley for his helpful feedback on an earlier draft. BNK was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (#0234618). BAK was supported by “Reducing Barriers to Mental Health Task Sharing” funded by NIMH (K01MH104310-01).

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Research Paper About Idiom

This chapter outlines the background to L2 idiom comprehension and production an overview of some notable advances in idiom teaching in an EFL context. In particular, Section 1.1 discloses the factors influencing the comprehension of L2 idiomatic phrases and yields insight into the issue of idiom comprehension in non-native speakers. Section 1.2 discusses the pedagogical approaches implementable in teaching figurative idioms There are many relevant researches. In his works entitled Studies of Chinese I A main important part of second language research deals with different aspects of teaching idioms. For example, Nattinger, De Carrico, (1992) cited in Tajali & Tehrani (2009) considers idioms as most important subcategory of lexical phenomenon …show more content…

On the other words EFL learners who only learn individual words will need a lot of time and endeavor to express themselves. Consequently, it is important and essential to make students aware of idioms and their ability to usage in language production. When idioms in one language are translated in to other languages they may lose their actual meaning because many idioms are specific to the culture. Idioms are special mode of expression, use or grouping of words, peculiar to a specific language (The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, 1958). Type of idiom According to Stathi (2006:27), the term ‘idiom’ can refer to two types of fixed expressions. First, in a narrow sense, idioms are ‘expressions whose idiomaticity is semantic; typical expressions are kick the bucket, spill the beans etc. Second, idiomaticity is a formal property of expressions and is more or less equated with the fixedness of form; for example, by and large. Reasons for learning and teaching L2

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  • Linguistics
  • Language acquisition
  • Second language acquisition
  • Second language
  • Language education

Research Paper On Idioms

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  1. (PDF) Idiomatic expressions in English: a textual analysis

    Following a functional tradition, this paper attempts to study the meanings of English idiomatic expressions from a textual perspective, focusing especially on (1) how idioms serve to signal ...

  2. A thematic corpus-based study of idioms in the Corpus of Contemporary

    An idiom is defined as a "constituent or series of constituents for which the semantic interpretation is not a compositional function of the formatives of which it is composed" (Fraser, 1970; p.22).Idiomaticity is a topic of some research and studies in the areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and neuropsychology (Cacciari, 1993).

  3. PDF A Corpus-Based Study of Idioms in Academic Speech

    This research reports the results of a corpus-based study of the idioms of academic speech with the aim of examining the feasibility of identifying those worth teaching to students of English for academic purposes (EAP). It identifies the idioms that occur in academic speech, analyzes their functions, and offers some implications for teaching ...

  4. The bottom line: Are idioms used in English academic ...

    This paper therefore centres on the use of idioms (e.g. the bottom line) recorded in the British Academic Spoken English corpus, compared with the same idioms used in written academic texts from the Oxford Corpus of Academic English. The aim of the research was to discover whether idioms are actually used in academic English and, if so, which ...

  5. The Development of Idiom Knowledge Across the Lifespan

    The grand averages show a clear increase in idiom familiarity over age that proceeds until at least 55 years of age. We also observed a predicted delay in the rise of the idiom vocabulary, compared to single-word acquisition, by about 10 years, as the steep increase in idiom acquisition levels off after 30 years.

  6. PDF A Syntactic Study of Idioms

    more notably, she has shared with me her enthusiasm for the research on both the syntax of idioms and psych-verbs, and this has proved to be contagious. Professor Anna Bondaruk has helped me in so many ways, providing me with her encouragement, empathy, and kindness.

  7. Idioms and Phraseology

    Overall, current research shows that the study of idioms and collocations (Fellbaum, ... The paper is mainly devoted to the study of the syntactic restrictions that idioms show and introduces a Frozeness Hierarchy of syntactic processes according to which they can be characterized. Any idiom marked as belonging to one level in this hierarchy ...

  8. A Corpus-Based Study of Idioms in Academic Speech

    The test is designed in alignment with previous research on measuring vocabulary and idiom knowledge. In detail, this study is focused on measuring the depth of idioms, so the techniques used in ...

  9. (PDF) The comprehension of idioms

    The aim of the present paper is to critically discuss the most influential views that have been put forward with regard to L1 idiom-comprehension as well as to provide a critical overview of the ...

  10. English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: a

    II Psycholinguistic idiom research Over the last few decades, psycholinguistic idiom research has been dominated by several approaches to idiom comprehension and. Beate Abel 331 representation and by the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis (Gibbs and Nayak, 1989). One of the central questions was whether during

  11. A Study of Idioms in Relation to Language Universals

    A STUDY OF IDIOMS 5 Language Universals The phenomenon that this research addresses is universal experiences that are expressed in various languages through figurative speech, which includes idioms. Research shows that there are common concepts that many languages acknowledge— referred to as near-universal metaphors (Kövecses, 2010).

  12. PDF A thematic corpus-based study of idioms in the Corpus of ...

    The main source of the idioms of the study was the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms with about 5000 British and American idioms, and the research was based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is possible that British idioms are not fully and representatively pre-sented in COCA.

  13. The bottom line: Are idioms used in English academic ...

    This paper therefore centres on the use of idioms (e.g. the bottom line) recorded in the British Academic Spoken English corpus, compared with the same idioms used in written academic texts from the Oxford Corpus of Academic English. The aim of the research was to discover whether idioms are actually used in academic English and, if so, which ...

  14. Teaching idioms in English as a second language

    Created as combined research in the domains of applied cognitive linguistics and phraseology, this paper aims to shed a light on the metaphorical aspect of idioms as important cultural elements, taking as an example idioms with the component "heart", as well as to point to the innovative possibilities of teaching these expressions in second ...

  15. Top 20 Commonly Used Idioms for Research Writing

    One powerful tool at their disposal is the use of academic idioms. These idiomatic expressions, when used appropriately, can enhance the clarity, sophistication, and persuasive power of research papers. In this blog post, we will explore the top 20 idioms commonly used by researchers, providing their definitions and accompanied by examples. 1.

  16. The Research of English Idioms in Every Aspect

    The Research of English Idioms in Every Aspect. L. Sun. Published 2008. Education. Journal of Huaibei Professional and Technical College. An idiom is an expression whose meaning does not seem to follow logically from the combination of the meaning of its parts and from the "rules of language".It is probably the case that every human language ...

  17. (PDF) THE CLASSIFICATION OF IDIOMS

    Abstract. This article aims at investigating the significance of idioms in linguistic research. The paper tries to shed light on the definition and importance of idioms by a number of scholars ...

  18. Inferring the Meaning of Idioms: Does Accuracy Matter for Retention in

    The available body of research on the benefits of inferencing for vocabulary learning shows rather mixed results. Mondria (2003) compared 'meaning inferred' and 'meaning given' procedures for Dutch students learning sets of unfamiliar French words embedded in sentences. In the meaning-inferred condition, students were asked to first infer the meaning of the words using contextual clues ...

  19. "Thinking too much": A Systematic review of a common idiom of distress

    Publications were included for full review if they met the following criteria: (1) the publication mentioned "thinking too much" or a closely related idiom in the body of the text, (2) the publication included empirical qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research regarding the idiom, and (3) the publication was in English.

  20. Research Paper About Idiom

    Research Paper About Idiom. 1281 Words6 Pages. This chapter outlines the background to L2 idiom comprehension and production an overview of some notable advances in idiom teaching in an EFL context. In particular, Section 1.1 discloses the factors influencing the comprehension of L2 idiomatic phrases and yields insight into the issue of idiom ...

  21. (PDF) ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF IDIOMATIC ...

    In conducting this research, the writer applies qualitative approach by using content analysis to observe the types of idioms found in the students' essays and doing an interview sessions in ...

  22. Research Paper On Idioms

    1. Research Paper On Idioms Idioms Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines an idiom as 'a group of words whose meaning is different from the meaning of the individual words.' Almost every language has its own collection idioms, or wise sayings. They offer advice about how to live and also transfer some underlying ideas, principles and values of a given culture / society.

  23. Translation of Idioms: A Hard Task for the Translator

    Since the previous studies on idiom translation mainly focus on the linguistic level, this paper mainly discusses the translation of idioms from a cognitive perspective, that is relevance theory.