L1 Chinese L2 English learners’ acquisition of English collocations: online and offline perspectives

This study investigated the processing and production of English collocations by L1 Chinese L2 English learners. It examined whether the variables of input frequency, L2 intralexical knowledge, and L1 congruency would affect L1 Chinese L2 English learners' processing and production of collocations. The participants included English native speakers as the control group and intermediate and advanced Chinese speakers with and without overseas learning experience as the experimental groups. Two elicitation tasks were used for collecting data, including an online primed lexical decision task (LDT）and an offline fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice task. The task items consisted of collocations and non-collocations. Adopting the corpus-based approach, we selected the items from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In each task, the collocation items were divided into four sub-groups: (1). L1 congruent collocations (e.g. seek help, green light); (2). L1 incongruent collocations (e.g. breathe fire, small wonder); (3). Collocations with semantically-related words in different morphological forms (e.g. "natural" world, "naturalist" guide, "naturalistic" research); (4). Delexical collocations  (e.g. take action, make payments). The collocation items in each sub-group they were categorised into high-frequency group and low-frequency group based on the frequency data of each item provided by COCA. The results in this study indicated that L1 congruency, L2 intralexical knowledge, and input frequency affect L1 Chinese L2 English learners' processing and production of collocations. Additionally, the naturalistic English exposure, rather than English proficiency mainly determined leaners' collocational processing, while on their production of collocations, there tend to be the interaction of naturalistic English input and English proficiency.