Frequency and the emergence of prefabs: Evidence from monitoring

Abstract

Native English speakers were instructed to detect instances of /√p/ in spoken sentences by pressing a button as soon as they hear /√p/ regardless of whether it is inside another word. We observe that detection of the particle up is slower when the frequency of the verb+up collocation is low or extremely high than when it is medium. In addition, /√p/ is more difficult to detect in high-frequency words than medium-frequency or lowfrequency words. Thus word frequency has a monotonic effect on detectability of word parts while the effect of phrase frequency is U-shaped. These results support the hypotheses that lexical units compete with their parts during speech perception and that words and ultra-high-frequency phrases are stored in the lexicon.

Heating up or cooling up the brain? MEG evidence that phrasal verbs are lexical units

“…Our finding that the mediumfrequency phrasal verbs in our experiment produced a lexical effect contests the hypothesis that only ultra-high-frequent word combinations can be lexically stored (Kapatsinski & Radicke, 2009). …”

“…go up, keep up, line up). The experiments revealed a reduced ability to detect up within frequent words but speeded recognition in frequent verb-particle contexts; only for extremely frequent verb-particle combinations could a behavioural pattern be observed similar to that seen for single words (i.e., difficulty to detect a part within the whole, Kapatsinski & Radicke, 2009). These psycholinguistic results suggest that the large majority of verb-particle combinations are processed differently from single words, except for a few extremely frequent combinations, such as go up or set up (1531 and 8483 occurrences, respectively, in the 100 million word British National Corpus).…”

More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases

“…an infinitive clause). Kapatsinski and Radicke (2008) argue for competition between larger units and their parts when the whole-form is of sufficient frequency. Participants had to respond whenever they detected the particle 'up' in a verb-particle combination (e.g.…”

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

“…In particular, Kapatsinski and Radicke (2009) found that the sound sequence /ʌp/ was more difficult to detect in a monitoring task when it was em bedded in a highfrequency word compared to when it was embedded in a low frequency word. Kapatsinski and Radicke used these data to argue that frequent words may be perceived as unitized wholes, making their parts harder to detect (see also Bybee 2001;Hay 2003;Healy 1976;Kapatsinski 2010b for similar pro posals).…”