The effects of typographic enhancement on L2 collocation processing and learning from reading: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

Collocations have been of considerable interest to applied linguistics and SLA researchers, due to their pervasiveness in language. In corpus research, collocations are broadly defined as pairs of content words like nouns and adjectives that appear more frequently in language than the occurrence frequency of the individual words would predict (Biber et al. 1999). Typical examples in English are heavy rain and strong wind. As conventional forms of expression, collocations may be used to express concepts in an efficient manner, or serve as phrasal terminology in technical, scientific, or academic discourse (e.g. Schmitt and Carter 2004). Research has shown that L2 learners tend to produce many collocations that are deviant or non-nativelike (e.g. *make a photo) in their speech (Nekrasova 2009) and writing (e.g. Durrant and Schmitt 2009; Laufer and Waldman 2011). Although the evidence is far from conclusive, it is generally thought that L2 collocation knowledge develops slowly, and therefore does not always show up at the level of productive use (e.g. Durrant and Schmitt 2010). A better understanding of why this might be the case requires a closer look at the variables that may affect the learnability of collocations.