Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-kn6lq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-23T01:01:08.252Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fatal mistake, awful mistake, or extreme mistake? Frequency effects on off-line/on-line collocational processing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2014

SUHAD SONBUL
SUHAD SONBUL*
Affiliation:
Umm Al-Qura University University of Nottingham
*
Address for correspondence: Suhad Sonbul, P.O.Box: 10424 Makkah (zip code: 21955)Saudi Arabiasssonbul@uqu.edu.sa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explored whether native speakers of English and non-natives are sensitive to corpus-derived frequency of synonymous adjective-noun collocations (e.g., fatal mistake, awful mistake, and extreme mistake) and whether level of proficiency can influence this sensitivity. Both off-line (typicality rating task) and on-line (eye-movement) measures were employed. Off-line results showed that both natives and non-natives were sensitive to collocational frequency with clearer effects for non-natives as their proficiency increased. On-line, however, proficiency had no effect on sensitivity to frequency; both natives and non-natives showed early sensitivity to collocational frequency (first pass reading time). This on-line sensitivity disappeared later in processing for both groups (total reading time and fixation count). Results are discussed in light of usage-based theories of language acquisition and processing.

Keywords

collocationscorpus-derived frequencyeye-trackingusage-based models

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 419 - 437
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

I am greatly indebted to Professor Norbert Schmitt for his invaluable comments and suggestions on the research design. I would also like to thank Dr. Kathy Conklin and Dr. Walter van Heuven whose expertise in eye-tracking methodology and mixed-effects modelling were particularly useful. Any shortcomings are entirely my own responsibility.

References

Arnon, I., & Snider, N. (2010). More than words: frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 67–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balota, D. A., & Chumbley, J. I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 340–357.Google ScholarPubMed
Bell, A., Jurafsky, D., Fosler-Lussier, E., Girand, C., Gregory, M., & Gildea, D. (2003). Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113, 1001–1024.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2006). From usage to grammar: the mind's response to repetition. Language, 82 (4), 711–733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dagenbach, D., Horst, S., & Carr, T. H. (1990). Adding new information to semantic memory: How much learning is enough to produce automatic priming? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 581–591.Google ScholarPubMed
Davies, M. (2004). BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 410+ million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://www.americancorpus.org.Google Scholar
Durrant, P., & Doherty, A. (2010). Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6, 125–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N. C. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 143–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evert, S. (2008). Corpora and collocations. In Lüdeling, A. & Kytö, M. (eds.), Corpus linguistics. An international handbook (extended manuscript of Chapter 58, available online at http://cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/~severt/PUB/Evert2007HSK_extended_manuscript.pdf). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiss, G. R., Armstrong, C., Milroy, R., & Piper, J. (1973). An associative thesaurus of English and its computer analysis. In Aitken, A. J., Bailey, R. W. & Hamilton-Smith, N. (eds.), The Computer and Literary Studies. Edinburgh: University Press. Available online at http://www.eat.rl.ac.uk/.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (2000). A dynamic usage-based model. In Barlow, M. & Kemmer, S. (eds.), Usage-Based Models of Language (pp. 1–63). Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Leech, G., Rayson, P., & Wilson, A. (2001). Word frequencies in written and spoken English: based on the British National Corpus. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Liversedge, S. P., Paterson, K. B., & Pickering, M. J. (1998). Eye movements and measures of reading time. In Underwood, G. (ed.), Eye guidance in reading and scene perception (pp. 55–75).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marinis, T. (2003). Psycholinguistic techniques in second language acquisition research. Second Language Research, 19, 144–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, K. I., & Ellis, N. C. (2012). The roles of phonological short-term memory and working memory in L2 grammar and vocabulary learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34, 379–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, S. A., & Shillcock, R. C. (2003). Eye Movements Reveal the On-Line Computation of Lexical Probabilities During Reading. Psychological Science, 14, 648–652.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McLaughlin, J., Osterhout, L., & Kim, A. (2004). Neural correlates of second language word learning: Minimal instruction produces rapid change. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 703–704.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meara, P., & Jones, G. (1988). Vocabulary size as a placement indicator. In Grunwell, P. (ed.), Applied linguistics in society: British studies in applied linguistics 3 (pp. 80–87). London: CILT.Google Scholar
Morton, J. (1969). The interaction of information in word recognition. Psychological Review, 76, 165–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Schreiber, T. A. (1998). The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment norms. Available online at http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/.Google Scholar
Nesselhauf, N. (2005). Collocations in a learner corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team (2010). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological bulletin, 124, 372–422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rayner, K., & Duffy, S. A. (1986). Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory & Cognition, 14, 191–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reali, F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2007). Word-chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 161–170.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmitt, N., Schmitt, D., & Clapham, C. (2001). Developing and exploring the behaviour of two new versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test. Language Testing, 18, 55–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K., & Schmitt, N. (2011a). Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye-tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers. Second Language Research, 27, 251–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K., & van Heuven, W. J. B. (2011b). Seeing a phrase “time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 776–784.Google ScholarPubMed
Sonbul, S., & Schmitt, N. (2013). Explicit and implicit lexical knowledge: Acquisition of collocations under different input conditions. Language Learning, 63, 121–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosa, A. V., & MacFarlane, J. (2002). Evidence for frequency-based constituents in the mental lexicon: Collocations involving the word of. Brain and Language, 83, 227–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cognitive linguistics, 11, 61–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tremblay, A., Derwing, B., Libben, G., & Westbury, C. (2011). Processing Advantages of Lexical Bundles: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading and Sentence Recall Tasks. Language Learning, 61, 569–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 105–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolter, B., & Gyllstad, H. (2011). Collocational links in the L2 mental lexicon and the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 32, 430–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolter, B., & Gyllstad, H. (2013). Frequency of input and L2 collocational processing: A comparison of congruent and incongruent collocations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 451–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yamashita, J., & Jiang, N. (2010). L1 influence on the acquisition of L2 collocations: Japanese ESL users and EFL learners acquiring English collocations. TESOL Quarterly, 44, 647–668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar