Le rôle du contexte dans le traitement des expressions conventionnelles

It is generally considered that phraseological units are so pervasive in languages because of the processing advantages they confer. Although many studies have in fact demonstrated that such units are processed more quickly than matched non-phraseological sequences, the nature of these processing advantages continues to be debated. The current article contributes to this debate with an online experiment that examines the role played by context in the processing of conventional expressions. This experiment was carried out with a group of native speakers and two groups of non-native speakers of French. The results suggest that the processing advantages associated with conventional expressions are not the result of holistic storage for any of the three groups.