Word order effect in collocation processing
Collocations are words associated because of their frequent co-occurrence, which makes them predictable and leads
to facilitated processing. While there have been suggestions that collocations are stored as unanalysed chunks, other researchers
disagree. One of the arguments against holistic storage is the fact that collocations are not fixed phrases, for example, their
word order can vary. To explore whether reversed collocations retain the processing advantage that they have in their canonical
form, we conducted two primed lexical decision experiments: Experiment 1 in English, and Experiment 2 in Lithuanian, an
understudied language. We presented both forward and backward collocations and compared them to matched control phrases. We also
explored which collocational measure (phrasal frequency, MI, t-score, or ΔP) worked as the best predictor of
processing speed. We found a clear priming effect for both languages when collocations were presented in their forward form, which
is in line with previous research. There was no priming for the backward condition in English, but a priming effect for it in
Lithuanian, where the reversed word order is acceptable albeit marked. These results are not easily explained by holistic storage.
As far as collocational measures are concerned, they all seem to perform reasonably well, with none of them being clearly better
than the others.
Article outline
- Processing advantage for collocation
- Question of holistic storage
- Directionality
- Experiment 1
- Participants
- Stimuli
- Procedure
- Analysis
- Results
- Discussion
- Experiment 2
- Participants
- Stimuli
- Analysis
- Results
- Comparing different collocational measures
- Discussion
- General discussion
- Holistic storage
- Collocational measures
- Limitations
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Ramonienė, Meilutė
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Development of Applied Linguistics.
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Szudarski, Paweł
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