Why does an individual struggling with a foreign language have difficulty understanding idioms, such as 'kick the bucket,' compared to literal phrases?

💡 Explanation

Idiomatic comprehension involves retrieving an entire phrase as a single lexical item, bypassing compositional semantic analysis; therefore, a language learner needs to memorize the entire idiom, rather than constructing meaning from individual words, because their lexical access isn't automatized for holistic idiom retrieval.

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