The Effects Of Frequency,Meaningfulness And English Proficiency On The Processing Of Compositional Multiword Sequences

Corpus-driven research has demonstrated that compositional multiword sequences are pervasive in natural language and they are of vital importance in language acquisition and use.By conducting an online grammaticality judgment task and an online acceptability judgment,the present study aimed to investigate the effects of frequency(i.e.,token frequency and type frequency),meaningfulness and English proficiency on the processing of compositional multiword sequences by two groups of Chinese learners of English,with a view to examining the psychological reality of second language compositional multiword sequences and their influencing factors.The results were as follows:(1)Both the two proficiency groups displayed token frequency effects in their processing of compositional multiword sequences.The higher proficiency group tended to process compositional multiword sequences with high token frequency more efficiently than sequences with medium and low token frequency,and process sequences with medium token frequency more efficiently than sequences with low token frequency,while the lower proficiency group tended to only process compositional multiword sequences with high token frequency more efficiently than sequences with low token frequency.(2)The two proficiency groups were sensitive to the type frequency information of compositional multiword sequences,but this type frequency effect was constrained by the effects of token frequency and meaningfulness of multiword sequences.(3)The two proficiency groups were also sensitive to meaningfulness of compositional multiword sequences,but this effect was constrained by the token frequency effect.(4)Compared with the lower proficiency group,the higher proficiency group generally processed different types of compositional multiword sequences faster and more accurately.Findings of the present study demonstrate that second language compositional multiword sequences have psychological reality and support that usage-based approach is more suitable to guide studies on second language multiword sequence acquisition,and have some pedagogical implications in multiword sequence teaching and learning.