Effects of Collocational Congruency, Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of English Adjective-Noun Collocations

Abstract The present study investigates the effects of congruency and frequency on adjective-noun collocational processing for Chinese learners of English at two proficiency levels based on the data obtained in an online acceptability judgment task. The subject pool of this research included 60 English majors studying at a university in China; 30 were selected as a higher-proficiency group and 30 as a lower-proficiency group according to their Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt et al., 2001) scores and their self-reported proficiency in English. The experimental materials were programmed to E-prime 2.0 and included six types of collocations: (1) 15 high-frequency congruent collocations, (2) 15 low-frequency congruent collocations, (3) 15 high-frequency incongruent collocations, (4) 15 low-frequency incongruent collocations, (5) 15 Chinese-only items, and (6) 75 unrelated items for baseline data. The collected response times (RTs) and accuracy rates data were statistically analyzed by the use of an ANOVA test and pairwise comparisons through SPSS 16.0 software. The results revealed that: (1) the adjective-noun collocational processing of Chinese English learners is influenced by collocational frequency, congruency and L2 proficiency; (2) the processing time is affected by the interaction of congruency and frequency; and (3) the interactive effect of L2 proficiency in conjunction with congruency and frequency also influences the processing quality.