Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these…

The scores from vocabulary size tests have typically been interpreted as demonstrating that the target words are "known" or "learned." But "knowing" a word should entail the ability to use it in real language communication in one or more of the four skills. It should also entail deeper knowledge, such as knowing the…

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively ("at the end of the day"--"eventually"), literally ("at the end of the day"--"in the evening"), and novel phrases ("at the end of the war"). Native speaker results…

Despite a number of research studies investigating the Yes-No vocabulary test format, one main question remains unanswered: What is the best scoring procedure to adjust for testee overestimation of vocabulary knowledge? Different scoring methodologies have been proposed based on the inclusion and selection of nonwords in the test. However, there…

To date, there has been little empirical research exploring the relationship between implicit and explicit lexical knowledge (of collocations). As a first step in addressing this gap, two laboratory experiments were conducted that evaluate different conditions (enriched, enhanced, and decontextualized) under which both adult native speakers…

It is generally accepted that formulaic sequences like "take the bull by the horns" serve an important function in discourse and are widespread in language. It is also generally believed that these sequences are processed more efficiently because single memorized units, even though they are composed of a sequence of individual words, can be…

Although the Word Associates Format (WAF) is becoming more frequently used as a depth-of-knowledge measure, relatively little validation has been carried out on it. This report of two validation studies tackles various important WAF issues yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Study 1 conducted introspective interviews regarding students' WAF…

Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of memorised phrases. It is not clear though, whether adult second language learning works in the same way. It has been claimed that non-native language lacks idiomatic formulas, suggesting that learners neglect phrases, focusing instead on orthographic…

This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., "social services"). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC);…

One of the choices available in English is between one-word verbs (train at the gym) and their multi-word counterparts (work out at the gym). Multi-word verbs tend to be colloquial in tone and are a particular feature of informal spoken discourse. Previous research suggests that English learners often have problems with multi-word verbs, and may…

Asked native and nonnative speakers to give judgments of frequency for near synonyms in second-language lexical sets and compared those responses to modern corpus word counts. Native speakers were able to discern the core word in lexical sets either 77% or 85%, and nonnative speakers at 71% or 79%. (Author/VWL)