Objective frequency values of canonical and syntactically modified idioms: preliminary normative data

In this study we collected several objective frequency values for 124 Italian idiomatic expressions, in order to verify the relation among these measures of frequency and a set of subjective variables (e.g., familiarity, meaning knowledge, age of acquisition, etc.) which are relevant from a psycholinguistic perspective, since they are supposed to play a role in idiom processing. Specifically, we calculated the following frequency types: occurrences of content words, (lemma and word-form values), occurrences of canonical idioms (e.g., Paolo broke the ice), occurrences of syntactically manipulated idioms (e.g., The ice was suddenly broken by Paolo). We discuss the results of correlational analyses.