The Comprehension of Indonesian Idiom in Indonesian speakers

Proceedings of the 2nd International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Science

Year: 2019

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2iachss.2019.02.28

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The Comprehension of Indonesian Idiom in Indonesian speakers

S. S. Sofyaningrat

 

ABSTRACT: 

The study of how idioms are processed in human cognition is essential to find out whether the idioms are comprehended according to their idiomatic meanings that have one referent, or are comprehended according to the meaning of the words in the idioms. The majority of idiom comprehension studies that have been carried out are studies on English idioms, whereas for other languages the study of idiom has not been carried out, including in Indonesian. So the hypothesis related to comprehension of idioms cannot be said to be universal. This study aims to find out how the idioms are comprehended in Indonesian speakers’ cognition. This is a preliminary study which employs qualitative method with two stage tests. The first stage is to find out the familiarity of Indonesian idioms for Indonesian speakers, and the second stage is to find out how those idioms are comprehended.

Keywords: idiom; psycholinguistics; language processing; language comprehension; Indonesian.