Advantage in Reading Lexical Bundles is Reduced in Non-Native Speakers

Matteo Valsecchi,Viktoria KüNstler,Karl R Gegenfurtner,Brian J White,Sven Saage,Joybrato Mukherjee

doi:10.16910/jemr.6.5.2

Matteo Valsecchi, Viktoria KüNstler + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.6.5.2

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Abstract

Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles, which may be processed as holistic units, make up a large proportion of natural language. For language learners, however, formulaic patterns are a major barrier to achieving native like competence. The present study investigated the processing of lexical bundles by native speakers and less advanced non-native English speakers using corpus analysis for the identification of lexical bundles and eye-tracking to measure the reading times. The participants read sentences containing 4-grams and control phrases which were matched for sub-string frequency. The results for native speakers demonstrate a processing advantage for formulaic sequences over the matched control units. We do not find any processing advantage for non-native speakers which suggests that native like processing of lexical bundles comes only late in the acquisition process.

Highlights

It is widely accepted that natural language is to a great extent made up of multi-word expressions or formulae
First-pass reading time decreased as a function of both Exposure and Frequency, indicating that the nonnative speakers who were more exposed to English read the items faster and that items containing high-frequency words were read faster (Table 3)
We investigated the processing of 4grams by native speakers and non-native speakers by measuring first pass reading time and total reading time in an eye-tracking experiment

Summary

Introduction

It is widely accepted that natural language is to a great extent made up of multi-word expressions or formulae. Invariable idiomatic expressions such as a piece of cake or less fixed but frequent lexical bundles such as come to terms with perform a range of pragmatic and discourse organizing functions contributing to fluent and native-like language use Corpus-based studies were especially able to uncover and to describe many forms of formulaic expressions like idioms, collocations and lexical bundles in spoken and written language (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999; Moon, 1998), and in different subtypes of discourse, for instance, in academic language (Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008; Simpson & Mendis, 2003).

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