The Online Processing Of Adj-N Collocations By Chinese EFL Learners

The significance of collocations in language learning is self-explanatory.It is the horizontal combinatorial relationship between words and manifested by repeated co-occurrence of two or more words(Sinclair,1991).There are verb-noun collocations,adjective-noun(Adj-N)collocations,noun-noun collocations and verb-adverb collocations in English.At present,most of the research focuses on verb-noun collocations.Adj-N collocations are equally widely used in daily life,and it is difficult for learners to master it due to the variety of the collocations formed by the same noun or adjective.However,the research on Adj-N collocations has not received enough attention at present.The existing studies show that most of the English as foreign language learners(EFL)have a poor knowledge of Adj-N collocations.In terms of research method,corpora have been widely used in recent years to explore the characteristics of collocations produced by learners,but they did not explore the psychological aspect of participants in detail.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the feature of EFL learners’ online processing of Adj-N collocations.To be specific,the research is designed to explore whether the processing of Adj-N collocations by EFL learners is affected by collocation congruency,collocation frequency and participants’ proficiency.If so,how do these factors interact with each other ? Besides,how does the presence of the corresponding L1 words affect the processing of Adj-N collocations by EFL learners?To realize this purpose,by using e-prime,we presented different types of Adj-N collocations for participants to judge whether they are acceptable.Accuracy rate(AR)and reaction time(RT)of participants’ judgments were recorded and analyzed.Two groups of participants with 30 in each took part in this study.They stand for students with high and low English language ability respectively.In this study,there are two experiments whose only difference lies in the fact that corresponding Chinese collocations are presented as prime in experiment 2 to further explore the influence of L1 on EFL learners’ Adj-N collocations.The results show that the effect of English proficiency was significant in both experiments.High-level participants were more efficient than low-level participants in processing Adj-N collocations.The effects of collocation congruency and collocationfrequency in two experiments were different.In experiment 1,the effect of collocation congruency was only reflected on AR.The two groups both processed congruent collocations(CC)more accurately than English-only collocations(EOC).The role of collocation frequency was notable;both groups showed superiority over high frequency collocations(HFC).In experiment 2,the effect of collocation congruency played a more prominent role.Both groups processed CC more quickly and accurately than EOC,while the effect of collocation frequency on the two groups was different.For high-level participants,there wasn’t significant difference in processing HFC and low frequency collocations(LFC).For low-level participants,their RT and AR were both affected by collocation frequency.Finally,by comparing the results of the two experiments,it was found that the presence of Chinese primes exerted an important impact on the two groups.They reacted faster and more accurate in experiment 2.This study not only enriches the current research about online processing of Adj-N collocations,but also provides implication for pedagogy.What’s more,the thesis provides some references for further relevant research.