Collocational Processing in Light of the Phraseological Continuum Model: Does Semantic Transparency Matter?
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for constructive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also go to the audiences at the Vocab@Vic conference in Wellington, New Zealand, 2013; the AAAL conference in Portland, Oregon, 2014; and the Mental Lexicon conference in Niagara‐on‐the‐Lake, Canada, 2014, from whom we received helpful comments on earlier presentations of this study. The responsibility for any remaining errors lies with the authors. Finally, we would like to thank Sara Farshchi for her help with some of the data collection and the participants of the study for taking part. Work on this study was supported by the Swedish Research Council by means of a project grant (VR 2012 – 906) awarded to Henrik Gyllstad.
Abstract
The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and native English‐speaking controls (n = 38). Reaction times and error rates were recorded for free combinations, collocations, and baseline items. There was a processing cost for collocations compared to free combinations, for both groups of participants. This cost likely stems from the semantically semi‐transparent nature of collocations as they are defined in the phraseological tradition. Furthermore, phrasal frequency based on corpus values also predicted reaction times. These results lend initial support to the Continuum Model from a processing perspective and suggest that degree of semantic transparency together with phrasal frequency plays an important role in collocational processing.
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Number of times cited: 8
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