The effects of L1 priming, type of L2 collocation, its frequency, and individuals’ L2 proficiency on L2 collocation processing

The congruency effect—that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in immersive (Experiment 1) and nonimmersive (Experiment 2) L2 learners’ collocational processing while taking into account L2 collocation frequency, immersive learners’ L2 use, their length and starting age of immersion, nonimmersive learners’ length of instruction, and their L2 proficiency. The study also tested whether L1 counterparts of words in L2 collocations were activated. Nonmmersive learners showed a congruency effect in both processing speed and accuracy. In contrast, immersive learners were affected by congruency only in processing accuracy. Higher L2 collocation frequency, greater length of instruction, and higher L2 proficiency did not reduce the congruency effect, whereas longer duration of immersion improved the processing of incongruent items. An effect of L1 lexical frequency was found, an indication of L1 activation. Results were discussed in light of how L2 proficiency and experiences changed the amount of L1 influence in L2 collocational processing.

ABSTRACTThis study examined how congruency and L2 proficiency influence the processing of Chinese verb‐object collocations among Vietnamese learners of Chinese. Through acceptability judgment tasks comparing baseline (Experiment 1) and enhanced L1 activation (Experiment 2), three main findings were obtained: (1) Under baseline L1 activation, intermediate learners showed processing advantages in both reaction time (RT) and accuracy for L1‐L2 congruent collocations but only RT advantages for L2‐only collocations, while advanced learners exhibited both RT and accuracy advantages for L1‐L2 congruent and L2‐only collocations. Under enhanced L1 activation, intermediate learners retained processing advantages for L1‐L2 congruent collocations whereas advanced learners maintained advantages for both. (2) Congruency effects emerged solely in accuracy for both groups under baseline activation but extended to RT under enhanced activation. (3) The moderating effect of L2 proficiency on the congruency effect varied between activation states, with negligible differences between intermediate and advanced learners under baseline activation, but a gradual decrease in the congruency effect as L2 proficiency increased under enhanced activation. These results reveal divergences in congruency effects across L1 activation states, providing critical evidence for a direct causal link between L1 activation and congruency effects.

This is a follow-up on earlier studies of vocabulary acquisition and cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in advanced learners’ spoken French L3 (Lindqvist 2009, 2010; Lindqvist, Bardel & Gudmundson 2011). The purpose is to study advanced learners’ word choices in oral retellings of video films, focusing on the words chosen to express key objects, events or persons (see Jarvis 2000). It is investigated whether word choices differ between advanced learners and native speakers, and between advanced and low-intermediate learners. CLI in the learners’ word choices is also investigated. The results show that the learners use more general words than the native speakers. Furthermore, the advanced learners have more meaning-based CLI, while the low-intermediate learners have more formal CLI. Finally, some advanced learners transfer a preferred L1 option into L3.

This study examines the learning patterns of intermediate and advanced Korean learners in the acquisition of causative expressions according to their proficiency and the causative sentence type. We measured their grammatical knowledge using three types of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) and self-paced reading tasks (SPRTs) differing in time limit and modality. We included the GJT A' score and reading time (RT) for SPRTs’ target and spillover regions. The results showed that intermediate learners’ accuracy for morphological and lexical causatives was lower than that for syntactic causatives, while advanced learners’ accuracy for lexical causatives was lower than that for syntactic and morphological causatives. Learners showed a lower accuracy for timed written and aural GJTs than untimed GJT. In SPRT, learners took twice as long to process the target regions as native speakers and even longer to process spillover regions. Advanced learners had a longer RT. Learners had a low correct rate for causative suffix substitution and adjectival root questions, substitution questions on causative markers, and substitution questions on causee case postpositions in morphological, syntactic, and lexical causatives. Learners showed confusion with active sentences in lexical causatives. This study has implications for understanding causative expression acquisition for learners’ proficiency levels.

This study examines the roles of L1-L2 congruency, frequency, word class, and proficiency in L2 collocation processing. An acceptability judgment task was conducted to evaluate how participants processed verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations across four levels of congruency: congruent, partially congruent, L1-only, and L2-only collocations. The findings revealed that participants were sensitive to both congruency and collocation frequency. Moreover, as L2 proficiency increased, the congruency effect became pronounced, while the impact of collocation frequency remained consistently significant. The results indicate differences in response time (RT) and accuracy among incongruent, partially congruent, and fully congruent collocations, suggesting a need for a more nuanced approach to defining congruency than what has been used in the past studies. Regarding the word-class configurations, participants processed verb-noun collocations more quickly and accurately than adjective-noun collocations. Finally, our findings demonstrated a significant improvement in accuracy rates with increased proficiency. We argue that future research should carefully consider the effects of congruency, frequency, word class, and proficiency, as well as the potential interactions between these factors.

The paper presents an investigation of the extent and nature of cross-linguistic influence on both L2 and L1 phraseological competence of advanced Polish learners of English. We review relevant research studies, which describe various types of collocational deviation from native speaker norms in the language production of advanced learners, and indicate that the collocational choices of learners may be affected by their L1, which results either in incorrect collocations, or in patterns of underuse or overuse. We administered two acceptability judgment tests to 91 Polish advanced learners of English, aged 20–22. The collocations used in the test could be classified with respect to two criteria: firstly, they were either typical or unusual collocations; secondly, they were either congruent with their L1 or L2 equivalents or not. Despite the fact that there is both empirical and theoretical support for the idea that learners may show a preference for those L2 collocations which are congruent with L1, our findings do not support this hypothesis. There is no obvious pattern of cross-linguistic influence emerging from the data. The results of this study seem to give the picture of advanced learners who function in their L2 independently of the L1.

The use of ‘chunks’ is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) over the course of 18 months of English classes. Neither holistically rated proficiency scores nor common complexity measures had shown any progress in these learners, but a few lexically based measures did. Therefore, the development of chunks in these learners was examined as chunks are mostly lexical in nature and might show more subtle progress over time. The use of chunks was examined in the first and last two texts of the learners and, in line with previous research, it was found that more proficient writers use relatively more chunks, specifically collocations. Chunk coverage, the total number of chunk words divided by the total number of words, also correlated with some holistic proficiency scores, and increased significantly over time. Average chunk length did not show any correlation with proficiency scores nor did it increase over time. Increased proficiency in written texts is thus specifically related to the use of more chunks. This study shows that development in advanced Chinese L2 learners of English appears to be subtle, which might be due to the fact that at this advanced level mainly lexical changes take place. Future research into development over time in advanced learners may thus have to zoom in on lexical measures especially. Implications of this study point to the importance of promoting the use of target language chunks to advanced learners of English.

The current study aimed to investigate the influence of L1 on the processing of L2 collocations utilizing a phrase-acceptability judgement task. The task was conducted on 39 English collocations with 19 native speakers of English and 45 Korean EFL learners. Their error rates and reaction times were measured both on the congruent collocations that have L1 translation equivalents and the incongruent collocations that do not have ones. It was found that the advanced EFL learners responded significantly faster to and made fewer errors on both the congruent and the incongruent collocations than the intermediate EFL learners. Meanwhile, both the advanced and the intermediate EFL learners made significantly more errors and responded slower under incongruent condition, indicating a strong congruency effect. The results implied that there exists a high degree of reliance on L1 intralexical knowledge in processing L2 collocations by the EFL learners, and acquiring incongruent L2 collocations seems still challenging even to the advanced learners. However, it was also suggested that once EFL learners notice incongruent collocations as valid ones and store them in their L2 mental lexicon, they may be able to processing incongruent collocations as efficiently as native speakers, directly linking L2 collocation forms to their concepts independently of L1 mediation. (Hanyang University)

The current study investigated from a usage‐based perspective how phrasal frequency and collocational strength of verb–preposition collocations influence preposition placement in wh ‐relative clauses. Native English speakers and Chinese learners of English as a second language of the intermediate and advanced English proficiencies completed a sentence completion task and an acceptability judgment task. The results showed that native and nonnative speakers had an overall preference for preposition stranding. Native speakers had a stronger acceptance of preposition pied‐piping than nonnative speakers; advanced learners had a stronger acceptance of pied‐piping than intermediate learners. The collocational strengths of verb–preposition combinations had a significant effect on the productive use and acceptability of preposition placement for both native speakers and advanced learners. Intermediate learners’ preposition placement was more affected by phrasal frequency. Overall, the findings confirm that the distributional properties of verb–preposition collocations influence speakers’ preference for the type of wh ‐clause structure, which provides strong support to the usage‐based account of grammar analysis and grammar acquisition.

Abstract: The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary test. Participants were 15 intermediate and 15 advanced second language Spanish learners (first language English), and 15 native Spanish speakers. Overall results found that intermediate learner agreement scores differed significantly from those of native speakers on the GJT and PDT, but advanced learner scores did not differ from those of native Spanish speakers on either task. Findings for advanced learners demonstrate that once these learners know the meaning of a noun and can correctly assign its gender, gender agreement is relatively unproblematic. Results of the present study reinforce the importance of focusing learner attention on gender assignment while teaching noun meanings at least through intermediate levels, to aid in gender agreement accuracy by strengthening co-occurrence relations between nouns and their modifiers. Findings are discussed in terms of the lexical gender learning hypothesis (Grüter et al. 2012), which focuses on the relationship of input and experience to gender acquisition.

The present study investigated the effects of L1-L2 congruency, collocation type, and restriction on L2 collocational processing. Advanced Chinese learners of English and native English-speaking controls performed an online acceptability judgment task to investigate how advanced L2 learners processed congruent (sharing the same meaning and structure in L1 language) collocations and English-only (not equivalent in L1 construction) collocations with the same node (right) word and a different collocate (left). The experimental materials included verb-noun (VN), adjective-noun (AN) collocations, free (less fixed), and restricted (more fixed) collocations chosen from BNC. The results revealed that (i) The non-native speakers were sensitive to L1-L2 congruency, but the native speakers were not. (ii) The native speakers were sensitive to collocation restriction, whereas the non-native speakers were not. These results lend initial support to the mapping hypothesis and open choice principle of L2 collocational processing for Chinese English learners.

This study is twofold: (i) whether there is a significant difference between Chinese learners’ first language (L1) proficiency and second language (L2) performance in comprehension of certain multiply self-embedded complex English sentences such as (1) Tom knows that the fact that taking good care of himself is necessary surprises the boy; (ii) whether there is a relationship between Chinese learners’ L1 proficiency and L2 processing strategies in the use of syntactic and/or semantic information in the comprehension performance. Two groups of advanced Chinese learners of English differing in Chinese proficiency (i.e. fifteen high Chinese proficiency (HCP) and fifteen low Chinese proficiency (LCP) learners of English) and one control group participated in the off-line experiment to answer questions to English sentences based on comprehension accuracy. The results show that there are no significant accuracy differences between HCP learners and LCP learners in the complex English sentence comprehension, suggesting that L1 proficiency play no significant role in Chinese learners’ complex English sentence comprehension. When doing a complex-rating task where participants rated complexity of the self-embedded complex English sentences based on a five-point scale, the results show that the LCP Chinese learners of English, like the control native English speakers, were able to use both syntactic and semantic information. However, the HCP Chinese learners of English relied more on semantic information than syntactic cues, indicating that L1 proficiency may influence Chinese learners’ processing strategy in comprehension of the complex English sentences.

Phonological memory and aptitude components: Contributions to second language proficiency

This study investigated the influence of frequency effects on the processing of congruent (i.e., having an equivalent first language [L1] construction) collocations and incongruent (i.e., not having an equivalent L1 construction) collocations in a second language (L2). An acceptability judgment task was administered to native and advanced nonnative English speakers (L1 Swedish) to assess response times to and error rates for these collocations along with a matched set of unrelated items. The results suggested that advanced learners are highly sensitive to frequency effects for L2 collocations, which seems to support the idea that usage-based models of language acquisition can be fruitfully applied to understanding the processes that underlie L2 collocational acquisition. At the same time, however, the apparent continued influence of the L1 indicates that researchers may also want to draw on other models of language acquisition to gain a fuller understanding of the processes underlying the acquisition of collocations in a L2.

Verb semantics in second language French: Transitivity, unergativity & unaccusativity