AUTHOR=Lou Jie TITLE=The development of L2 collocational familiarity and its relationship with collocational frequency and congruency JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=15 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1332692 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1332692 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

The present study took L2 English learners of different levels in China as subjects to investigate the relationship between collocational familiarity and collocational frequency as well as L1-L2 congruency, and then explored the development of the above relationship as L2 proficiency develops. The results showed that: a moderate positive correlation existed between familiarity and frequency, and the correlation increased with proficiency; a moderate positive correlation also existed between familiarity and congruency, but the correlation decreased with proficiency. Based on previous studies and the present findings, the research group infer that: low familiarity collocations tend to be represented and processed in analytic way and same-translation effect helps accelerate the semantic access of congruent collocations in this process; with the increase in learners’ proficiency, collocation familiarity develops from low to high with frequency effect; high familiarity collocations tend to be represented and processed in holistic way to have direct semantic access; furthermore, learners of two levels have two kinds of collocational representation and semantic access, but low-level learners show more analytic representation and indirect semantic access because of having more low familiarity collocations in the mental lexicon.