Frequency effects on first and second language compositional phrase comprehension and production

Abstract

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition posit that first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers should process more frequent compositional phrases, which have a meaning derivable from word parts, faster than less frequent ones (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Ellis, 2011). Although this prediction has received increasing empirical support, methodological limitations in previous relevant studies include a lack of control of frequencies of subparts of target phrases and scant attention to L2 production. Addressing these limitations, the current study tested phrase frequency effects in both language comprehension and production in two respective experiments, in which adult native English speakers (N = 51) and English L2 learners (N = 52) completed a timed phrasal decision task and an elicited oral production task. Experiment 1 revealed phrase frequency effects in both groups, lending support to usage-based researchers’ proposal that L1 and L2 speakers retain memory of word co-occurrences and that compositional phrase processing reflects an accumulation of statistics in previously encountered input. Experiment 2, however, provided weaker evidence for phrase frequency effects in these participant groups. Based on the results and previous empirical studies, methodological issues that may have impacted frequency effects and implications for future work in this area are discussed.

Effects of semantic plausibility, syntactic complexity and n-gram frequency on children's sentence repetition

“…Arnon and Snider (2010) found that high-frequency multiword phrases were processed faster by adults than strings of lower frequency in a series of phrasal decision tasks. A recent study by Supasiraprapa (2019) replicated this finding using the same stimuli with native and non-native speakers of English. Using a reading task, Tremblay, Derwing, Libben and Westbury (2011) showed that this was even true when n-grams straddled syntactic constituents, with non-constituent sequences of higher n-gram frequency read faster than their lower frequency counterparts (e.g.…”

“…However, the correlation between PC1 and plausibility was very low (see Table 1), indicating very little risk of confounding. More importantly, whereas our study took continuous measures of n-gram frequency, previous studies manipulated ngram frequency in sequences designed to exclude other factors, resulting in highly controlled sets of stimuli (Arnon & Snider, 2010;Arnon & Priva, 2013;Bannard & Matthews, 2008;Supasiraprapa, 2019). As a result, our measure of n-gram frequency differed from previous studies in three key respects, all of which may have contributed to the lack of a positive effect of n-gram frequency in our study.…”

Communicative Competence Fostered in a Nested EFL Learning Ecology: Technology-Enhanced Learning in the Chinese Context

“…Usage-based theories believe that an individual's linguistic competence emerges from language use (Ellis, 2015;Tomasello, 2003;Behrens, 2009). The frequency of input and use plays a central role in L2 acquisition (Supasiraprapa, 2019). As frequency bolsters the representation of linguistic elements in memory, it facilitates the activation and processing of constructions (Diessel, 2017).…”

Usage-Based Individual Differences in the Probabilistic Processing of Multi-Word Sequences

“…Of course, word associations and other lexical-level factors are not the only force affecting lexical processing; n-gram (or chunk) frequency is also a major factor (Lorenz and Tizón-Couto, 2019;Supasiraprapa, 2019). Usage-based approaches posit that the comprehender does not access, concatenate, or integrate the component words of highfrequency n-grams but rather retrieves chunks of varying sizes holistically (Blumenthal-Dramé, 2017;Ambridge, 2020;Havron and Arnon, 2021).…”