During idiom production speakers produce words that all have a meaning on their own that does not contribute to the overall meaning of the phrase. Nonetheless, in a study on elicited idiom blends Cutting and Bock (1997) found evidence for the activity of literal word meanings during idiom production. This finding is consistent with our superlemma model of idiom representation. It combines simple lemma access with access of a superlemma that represents the idiom as a whole. The superlemma model predicts that literal word meanings become active only by means of indirect activation of the word's concepts. We combined idiom production with acoustic priming, using words that were either phonologically or semantically related to the noun of an idiom. Prime words were presented at different SOAs and speech onset latencies were measured. The results support the superlemma model, showing that literal word meanings become active during idiom production. In addition, they replicate Cutting & Bock's speech error results by means of 'online' measurement of speech onset latencies.
References
Cutting, C.J. & Bock, K. (1997). That's the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blends. Memory & Cognition, 25, 57-71.