Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences, using items that varied in chunk meaningfulness. In a phrasal‐decision study, we compared reaction times for triads of three‐word sequences, corresponding to idiomatic expressions, compositional phrases, and phrasal fragments, while controlling for phrase and substring frequencies. Chunk meaningfulness, as assessed by a separate subjective rating study, was found to speed up decision times for all three types of strings: The more meaningful a multiword sequence was judged to be, the faster it was processed, independently of whether it was idiomatic, compositional in nature, or a phrasal fragment. These results highlight the importance of taking meaning into account when considering the processing of multiword chunks, consistent with predictions of construction‐based approaches to language.

中文翻译：

---

多词块处理中的意义胜过频率

尽管越来越多的工作表明成人和儿童都对频繁出现的词序列很敏感，但人们对意义在处理此类多词块中的潜在作用知之甚少。在这里，我们迈出了第一步，使用块意义不同的项目来评估意义在多词序列处理中的贡献。在一项短语决策研究中，我们比较了对应于惯用表达、组合短语和短语片段的三词序列三元组的反应时间，同时控制了短语和子串频率。由一项单独的主观评级研究评估的块意义被发现可以加快所有三种类型字符串的决策时间：多词序列被判断为越有意义，它的处理速度越快，无论它是惯用的、本质上的组合还是短语片段。这些结果强调了在考虑处理多词块时考虑意义的重要性，这与基于结构的语言方法的预测一致。