Advantage in Reading Lexical Bundles is Reduced in Non-Native Speakers

Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles, which may be processed as holistic units, make up a large proportion of natural language. For language learners, however, formulaic patterns are a major barrier to achieving native like competence. The present study investigated...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Matteo Valsecchi (Author), Viktoria Künstler (Author), Sven Saage (Author), Brian J. White (Author), Joybrato Mukherjee (Author), Karl R. Gegenfurtner (Author)
Format: Book
Published: Bern Open Publishing, 2013-12-01T00:00:00Z.
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Summary:Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles, which may be processed as holistic units, make up a large proportion of natural language. For language learners, however, formulaic patterns are a major barrier to achieving native like competence. The present study investigated the processing of lexical bundles by native speakers and less advanced non-native English speakers using corpus analysis for the identification of lexical bundles and eye-tracking to measure the reading times. The participants read sentences containing 4-grams and control phrases which were matched for sub-string frequency. The results for native speakers demonstrate a processing advantage for formulaic sequences over the matched control units. We do not find any processing advantage for non-native speakers which suggests that native like processing of lexical bundles comes only late in the acquisition process.
Item Description:10.16910/jemr.6.5.2
1995-8692