When Congruency Meets Figurativeness: Does Congruency Facilitation or Figurative Interference Persist in Second Language Collocational Processing?

Abstract The present study investigates whether congruency facilitation and figurative interference—two counteractive effects—persist in L2 collocational processing when both congruency and figurativeness are present. A primed lexical decision task was administered to 44 L1‐Chinese L2‐English learners and 40 L1‐English speakers to assess response times for figurative congruent collocations, along with their matched literal congruent and figurative incongruent collocations. Results showed that while collocational priming was absent, both congruency facilitation and figurative interference emerged, with their effects modulated by L2 proficiency. Specifically, in low‐proficiency learners, congruency facilitation appeared to outweigh figurative interference, whereas in high‐proficiency learners, figurative interference became more pronounced as L1‐based facilitation was suppressed. These findings suggest that L2 learners initially rely on their activated L1 semantic network but gradually shift toward developing L2 collocational representations as proficiency increases, though these representations may remain weak and insufficient to facilitate collocate access.