Dogus Oksuz: "Collocational Processing in L1 and L2: The Effects of Word Frequency, Collocational Frequency, and Association"

Dogus Oksuz (School of Education, University of Leeds)

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency and transitional probabilities on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to advanced L2 and L1 speakers of English. Response times were analysed using mixed-effects modelling for three types of adjective-noun pairs: (1) high-frequency, (2) low-frequency and (3) baseline items. This study extended the previous findings by looking at whether the effects of individual word and collocation frequency counts change for L1 and L2 speakers’ processing of low-frequency and high-frequency collocations. It also looked at the differences between L1 and L2 speakers’ sensitivity to mutual information and log dice scores, which are corpus-derived association measures, for processing collocations. Both groups of participants demonstrated sensitivity to both individual word and collocation frequency counts. However, there was a reduced effects of word frequency counts for processing high-frequency collocations compared to low-frequency collocations. Both groups were similarly sensitive to the mutual information and log dice measures.