Getting your wires crossed: Evidence for fast processing of L1 idioms in an L2

Gareth Carrol,Kathy Conklin

doi:10.1017/s1366728913000795

Abstract

Monolingual speakers show priming for idiomatic sequences (e.g. a pain in the neck) relative to matched controls (e.g. a pain in the foot); single word translation equivalents show cross-language activation (e.g. dog–chien) for bilinguals. If the lexicon is heteromorphic (Wray, 2002), larger units may show cross-language priming in the same way as single words. We used the initial words of English idioms (e.g. to spill the. . . beans) and transliterated Chinese idioms (e.g. draw a snake and add. . . feet) as primes for the final words in a lexical decision task with high proficiency Chinese–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Bilinguals responded to targets significantly faster when they completed a Chinese idiom (e.g. feet) than when they were presented with a matched control word (e.g. hair). The results are discussed in terms of conceptual activation and lexical translation processes, and are also incorporated into a dual route model of formulaic and novel language processing.

Highlights

Formulaic language is no flash in the pan
The test included two items each from the first ten British National Corpus (BNC) word lists to give a total proficiency score out of 20. This was augmented with any potentially unknown vocabulary items that appeared in the online experiment
Two non-native speakers were removed from the analysis: both had a large number of extreme response times (RTs), suggesting that either they were not engaging in the task or that the English task was too difficult for them

Summary

Introduction

The definition of formulaic language used here is taken from Wray and Perkins (2000): “a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar” Such sequences account for between a third and a half of spontaneous discourse (Erman & Warren, 2000; Foster, 2001). They contribute to speaker fluency (Pawley & Syder, 1983), facilitate real-time communication (Code, 1994) and reduce demands on working memory (Conklin & Schmitt, 2008). They present a particular challenge to non-native speakers, as they are both an important part of native-like competence and one of the hardest aspects of a language to master. Cieslicka (2006) suggested that a better understanding of how non-native speakers acquire and use formulaic language should be a key goal of modern psycholinguistic and applied linguistic research

Methods

Results

Conclusion