1. Introduction Idioms, such as “to bury the hatchet” (meaning to end a conflict), form an important part of the native speaker’s phrasal vocabulary, which is frequently used in everyday communication (Pawley and Syder 1983). One of the key questions in psycholinguistic research on idioms concerns how this knowledge is represented and accessed by the language user. Hybrid theories of idiom representation and processing (e.g., Cacciari and Tabossi 1988; Titone and Connine 1999; Sprenger et al.
