Collocational Links in the Multilingual Mind: Frequency Intuitions and Association Strength Measures

Abstract

Collocations are ubiquitous in everyday language, which help language users sound more natural and ease the processing burden during language production. They are also commonly taught in foreign language classrooms and those learners who can master these prevalent word combinations and chunks get to use the language more fluently as they enjoy a processing advantage. There are different approaches to the definition of these frequently co-occurring word combinations, but the current study embraces the frequentist approach which adopts a corpus linguistic technique and tries to combine corpus linguistics and user intuition data in its interpretations. Collocations have been extensively investigated from many different angles using both corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics techniques so far. Having its spark in the theory of collocational priming, the present study attempts to (a) investigate the relationship between corpus-driven association measures and the collocational frequency judgements of L1 Turkish-L2 English-L3 Italian users, (b) analyse the possible effect of congruence across the languages on the frequency relationship, (c) question if there is a difference between L1 Italian users’ and L3 Italian users’ sensitivity towards collocational strength based on their collocational frequency intuitions in Italian and (d) find humble evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of collocations in the L3 Italian mental lexicon, if any. The results indicate that language users’ frequency judgements in L2 English and L3 Italian correlate with an association measure (t-score) and the frequency of congruent items are judged more accurately. Additionally, L3 Italian users’ frequency intuitions overlap with native Italian users to a certain extent. The findings are discussed in the light of the earlier research on usage-based language use and frequency intuition.