ERIC Number: EJ1069926
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015-Sep
Pages: 30
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0023-8333
EISSN: N/A
Investigation of Native Speaker and Second Language Learner Intuition of Collocation Frequency
Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna; Spina, Stefania
Language Learning, v65 n3 p533-562 Sep 2015
Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How do L2 learners and native speakers compare against each other and corpora in their subjective judgments of collocation frequency? Native speakers and learners of Italian were asked to judge 80 noun-adjective pairings as one of the following: high frequency, medium frequency, low frequency, very low frequency. Both L1 and L2 intuitions of high frequency collocations correlated strongly with corpus frequency. Neither of the two groups of participants exhibited accurate intuitions of medium and low frequency collocations. With regard to very low frequency pairings, L1 but not L2 intuitions were found to correlate with corpora for the majority of the items. Further, mixed-effects modeling revealed that L2 learners were comparable to native speakers in their judgments of the four frequency bands, although some differences did emerge. Taken together, the study provides new insights into the nature of L1 and L2 intuitions about phrasal frequency.
Descriptors: Intuition, Second Language Learning, Native Speakers, Phrase Structure, Word Frequency, Italian, Nouns, Form Classes (Languages), Correlation, Computational Linguistics, Language Research, Accuracy, Comparative Analysis, Task Analysis
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A