Abstract
Collocations, e.g., apples and pears, hard worker, constitute an important avenue of linguistic enquiry straddling both grammar and the lexicon. They are sensitive to language experience, with adult L2 learners and children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) exhibiting poor collocational knowledge. The current study piloted a novel collocational assessment with children (mean age 6;3, 40 monolingual, 32 EAL). It investigated (1) the feasibility of a collocational assessment at this age, (2) whether collocational knowledge is associated with other language domains (receptive grammar and vocabulary), and (3) whether collocational knowledge is more affected than other domains. The assessment demonstrated good psychometric properties and was highly correlated with performance in other domains, indicating shared psycholinguistic mechanisms. Unlike adult counterparts, the EAL children performed equally poorly across domains. Given the role played by collocations in vocabulary development and reading, a focus on this domain may be beneficial for EAL children.
Highlights
A key aspect of language is its generativity, which enables us to combine words in novel ways to express novel meanings, e.g., odourless smelly concepts slumber viscously, or she coughed the napkin off the table
These range from collocations, or ‘words which go together’ such as make amends, or hazard a guess, to phrasal idioms such as kick the bucket (= to die), or even entire sentences, e.g., what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Such formulaic units vary substantially in terms of their size and behaviour
The study had three aims: to determine whether collocational knowledge in children could be assessed with high degrees of reliability and validity; to explore the relationship, in children, between collocational knowledge and other linguistic abilities; and to compare the profiles of monolingual and English as an Additional Language (EAL) children
Summary
A key aspect of language is its generativity, which enables us to combine words in novel ways to express novel meanings, e.g., odourless smelly concepts slumber viscously (adapted from Chomsky, 1957), or she coughed the napkin off the table (adapted from Goldberg, 1995). A key means of determining whole storage is collocational probability, whether the likelihood of words co-occurring is greater than would be predicted from their individual frequencies
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