The effects of meaning dominance and meaning relatedness on ambiguity resolution: Idioms and ambiguous words

Figurative language is language in which combining the meanings of the individual words in an expression leads to a different meaning than the speaker intends (Glucksberg, 1991), resulting in potential ambiguity between meanings. In this dissertation, we tested the predictions of a sentence processing framework in which literal and figurative language are not truly distinct. To do this, we examined the effects of two constructs—meaning dominance and meaning relatedness—on comprehension of idioms and ambiguous words. Processing similarities between these two types of ambiguous unit would indicate that ambiguities are resolved using the same processes during language comprehension, and therefore that literal and figurative language are broadly similar rather than being categorically distinct. In two parallel sub-experiments, Experiment 1 compared facilitation for dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous units in a primed lexical decision task. For ambiguous words, participants showed greater facilitation when one meaning was strongly dominant. For idioms, participants showed greater facilitation for idioms compared to control phrases, and lowest accuracy when responding to literal target words following highly figuratively-dominant idioms. Experiment 2 used eyetracking during reading to examine how biasing context affected idiom meaning activation, as well as how idiom meanings were integrated into a larger text. Participants read the idioms slowest when both figurative dominance and meaning relatedness were high, and fastest when meaning relatedness was high and figurative dominance was low, replicating results for ambiguous word reading found by Foraker and Murphy (2012). This is suggestive evidence for a language comprehension system that resolves ambiguities similarly regardless of grain size or literality. We also found facilitative effects of meaning relatedness in idiom reading parallel to the polysemy advantage in ambiguous word research, providing evidence that meaning relatedness is universal to many types of ambiguity resolution. The present study provides preliminary evidence that idioms and ambiguous words are treated similarly during ambiguity resolution. These results have implications for our understanding of idiom comprehension, and suggest valuable new avenues for future research

Is All Formulaic Language Created Equal? Unpacking the Processing Advantage for Different Types of Formulaic Sequences

Research into recurrent, highly conventionalised ‘formulaic’ sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to ‘novel’ (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases–idioms, binomials and collocations–and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly

Reading between the lines: psycholinguistic indices of prediction and formulaicity in language comprehension

A comprehensive model of language processing must account for not only how people process literal language, but also how nonliteral language is processed. Further, of theoretical interest to psycholinguists is the role that prediction plays in language processing, namely the conditions under which anticipating linguistic forms and structures can facilitate language comprehension. L1 research has underscored prediction as facilitative; namely, the more informative the surrounding context, the more readers anticipate upcoming information. Research using the transposed-letter (TL) effect shows that a target with transposed letters (cholocate) are read faster than targets containing substitutions (choeotate), as letter position/identity are encoded separately (Perea & Lupker, 2003, 2004). Luke and Christianson (2012) demonstrated that higher semantic constraints lead to specific expectations for letter position/identity, showing that TL effects index prediction. While L2 research has investigated prediction in L2 processing, this research primarily addresses comprehension of literal language. In cases of semantically opaque—or idiomatic—language, it is unclear whether phrase literality affects predictive mechanisms in L1 or L2 processing. Finally, it is also unclear whether semantic opacity differentiates how expressions—literal or nonliteral—are stored and retrieved from the lexicon, namely in cases where dimension such as whole-string or substring frequency are controlled for. Results from three experiments in this dissertation support a dual-route model of language processing, where the mode of processing that is employed is ultimately determined by context

Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue

Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of lexicalised constructions—i.e., recurring multi-word units—in English open-domain spoken dialogues. We hypothesise that speakers use construction repetition to mitigate information rate, leading to an overall decrease in utterance information content over the course of a dialogue. We conduct a quantitative analysis, measuring the information content of constructions and that of their containing utterances, estimating information content with an adaptive neural language model. We observe that construction usage lowers the information content of utterances. This facilitating effect (i) increases throughout dialogues, (ii) is boosted by repetition, (iii) grows as a function of repetition frequency and density, and (iv) is stronger for repetitions of referential constructions

The influence of L1 knowledge, meaning knowledge and language exposure on the processing and production of english collocations among EFL learners

Interlingual influence plays a critical role in the acquisition of English collocations. L2 learners often produced L1-based errors (Nesselhauf, 2003). However, the working mechanism of interlingual influence on the acquisition of L2 collocations is not fully understood. The current study aimed to ascertain the positive and negative effects of L1 on the acquisition of English collocations among EFL learners by examining congruency effects on collocation processing and production, the activation of L1 in the processing as well as the errors in collocation production. The study also investigated the effects of meaning knowledge and language exposure on the acquisition of English collocations. Participants are 60 Chinese EFL learners and they were divided into two groups according to their English proficiency. Reaction Time (RT) research techniques and a productive test were utilized to examine L1 influence on English collocation processing and production respectively. The data of the processing tasks were analyzed in quantitative ways, and the data of the productive test were firstly analyzed with statistical techniques and were further analyzed with the technique of Error Analysis. The study has gained significant congruency effects on processing (p<.001) and production (p<.001), significant priming effects of L1, with F (2,58)=49.004, P<.01, on the processing of incongruent collocations, but non-significant effects of language exposure and meaning knowledge. Almost a half of incongruent collocations were given more than 50% L1-induced deviant answers in production. The results revealed that L1 played positive and negative roles in the acquisition of English collocations, and transferred L1 would be fossilized in L2 lexicon and was hard to be discarded. The findings provide insights into interlingual influence on English collocation processing and production, as well as some implications for theory construction. Based on the findings, the study gave suggestions for pedagogical practice on L2 collocation acquisition and further research

Found in translation: The Influence of the L1 on the Reading of Idioms in a L2

© 2016 Cambridge University Press. Formulaic language represents a challenge to even the most proficient of language learners. Evidence is mixed as to whether native and nonnative speakers process it in a fundamentally different way, whether exposure can lead to more nativelike processing for nonnatives, and how L1 knowledge is used to aid comprehension. In this study we investigated how advanced nonnative speakers process idioms encountered in their L2. We used eye-tracking to see whether a highly proficient group of L1 Swedes showed any evidence of a formulaic processing advantage for English idioms. We also compared translations of Swedish idioms and congruent idioms (items that exist in both languages) to see how L1 knowledge is utilized during online processing. Results support the view that L1 knowledge is automatically used from the earliest stages of processing, regardless of whether sequences are congruent, and that exposure and advanced proficiency can lead to nativelike formulaic processing in the L2

Collocational processing in typologically different languages, English and Turkish::Evidence from corpora and psycholinguistic experimentation

Unlike the traditional words-and-rules approach to language processing (Pinker, 1999), usage-based models of language have emphasised the role of multi-word sequences (Christiansen & Chater, 2016b; Ellis, 2002). Various psycholinguistic experiments have demonstrated that multi-word sequences (MWS) are processed quantitatively faster than novel phrases by both L1 and L2 speakers (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; Wolter & Yamashita, 2018). Collocations, a specific type of MWS, hold a prominent position in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and language pedagogy research. (Gablasova, Brezina, McEnery, 2017a). In this dissertation, I explored the processing of adjective-noun collocations in Turkish and English by L1 speakers of these languages through a corpus-based study and psycholinguistic experiments. Turkish is an agglutinating language with a rich morphology, it is therefore valid to ask if agglutinating structure of Turkish affects collocational processing in L1 Turkish and whether the same factors affect the processing of collocations in English and Turkish. In addition, this study looked at L1 and L2 processing of collocations in English. This thesis firstly has investigated the frequency counts and associations statistics of English and Turkish adjective-noun collocations through a corpus-based analysis of general reference corpora of English and Turkish. The corpus study showed that unlemmatised collocations, which does not take into account the inflected forms of the collocations, have similar mean frequency and association counts in the both languages. This suggests that the base forms – uninflected forms of the collocations in English and Turkish do not appear to have notably different frequency and association counts from each other. To test the effect of agglutinating structure of Turkish on the collocability of adjectives and nouns, the lemmatised forms of the collocations in the both languages were examined. In other words, collocations in the two languages were lemmatised. The lemmatisation brings the benefit of including the frequency counts of both the base and inflected forms of the collocations. The findings indicated that the vast majority (%75) of the lemmatised Turkish adjective-noun combinations occur at a higher-frequency than their English equivalents. In addition, agglutinating structure of Turkish appears to increase adjective-noun collocations’ association scores in the both frequency bands since the vast majority of Turkish collocations reach higher scores of collocational strengths than their unlemmatised forms. After the corpus study, I designed psycholinguistic experiments to explore the sensitivity of speakers of these languages to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in acceptability judgment tasks in English and Turkish. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that collocations which have similar collocational frequency and association scores are processed at comparable speeds in English and Turkish by L1 speakers of these languages. That is to say, both Turkish and English speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts. This finding is in line with many previous empirical studies that language users process MWS quantitively faster than control phrases (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; McDonald & Shillcock, 2003; Vilkaite, 2016). However, lemmatised collocation frequency counts affected the processing of Turkish and English collocations differently, and Turkish speakers appeared to attend to word-level frequency counts of collocations to a lesser extent than English speakers. These findings suggest that different mechanisms underlie L1 processing of English and Turkish collocations. The present study also looked at the sensitivity of L1 and L2 advanced speakers to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in English. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that L2 advanced speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts like L1 English speakers because as the collocation frequency counts increased, L1 Turkish-English L2 speakers responded to the collocations in English more quickly, as L1 English speakers did. The results indicated that both groups showed sensitivity to noun frequency counts, and L2 English advanced speakers did not appear to rely on the noun frequency scores more heavily than the L1 English group while processing adjective-noun collocations. These findings are in conflict with the claims that L2 speakers process MWS differently than L1 speakers (Wray, 2002)