Reading Collocations in an L2: Do Collocation Processing Benefits Extend to Non-Adjacent Collocations?

Laura Vilkaitė,Norbert Schmitt

doi:10.1093/applin/amx030

Laura Vilkaitė, Norbert Schmitt

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx030

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Abstract

Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g., provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g., ± 4 words), and these non-adjacent collocations (e.g., provide some of the information) occur very frequently in language. Nevertheless, how they are processed is less established. A recent study on reading non-adjacent collocations seems to suggest similar processing advantages as for adjacent collocations (Author 2016), but this study was limited to the performance of native speakers. The present study addresses the question of whether advanced non-native speakers also show processing advantages for nonadjacent collocations as native speakers do. Forty advanced non-native speakers of English read collocations in either adjacent or non-adjacent conditions, and their eye-movements were recorded. Mixed-effects analysis of their eye-movements was carried out. The results suggest that non-native speakers read adjacent collocations faster than non-formulaic controls, but this facilitation almost disappears for non-adjacent collocations.

Highlights

Formulaic language has been defined as recurring word combinations that are not constructed each time of use but rather have a stereotypical form, conventionalized meaning, and are highly familiar to a speech community (Van Lancker Sidtis 2012)
While for the first fixation duration it came out as a significant main effect with no significant interactions, the other two models would suggest that there was a significant interaction between the collocation status and adjacency
They suggest that there was a facilitative effect for adjacent collocations, but not for nonadjacent collocations

Summary

Introduction

Formulaic language has been defined as recurring word combinations that are not constructed each time of use but rather have a stereotypical form, conventionalized meaning, and are highly familiar to a speech community (Van Lancker Sidtis 2012). It is widely accepted that in reading, the duration of fixation on the word (the time that the eyes stay relatively still) is controlled by comprehension processes (Hyönä 2011) This conclusion is supported by many studies which show that word fixation time is influenced by a number of various factors including word length (Kliegl et al 2004), age of acquisition (Juhasz and Rayner 2003), concreteness (Juhasz and Rayner 2003), contextual predictability (Rayner 1998; Starr and Rayner 2001, Vainio, Hyönä, and Pajunen's 2009), orthographic neighbourhood size (Pollatsek, Perea, and Binder 1999), phonological neighbourhood density (Yates, Friend, and Ploetz 2008) and transitional probability (McDonald and Shillcock 2003a, 2003b). 15 were estimated using the lmerTest package (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, and Bojesen Christensen 2015)

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