The Effects of Two Association Measures on L2 Collocation Processing

Abstract

The influence of association measures has been little examined in research on L2 collocation processing. For this reason, the present study replicated Öksüz et al. (2020) experiment on intermediate L2 learners of English to determine whether the association measure mutual information (MI) is a stronger predictor of L2 performance than the Log Dice measure. Twenty-two intermediate Arab learners of English completed a timed acceptability judgment task on the online Gorilla platform. The task included (1) high-frequent collocations (e.g., bad news), (2) low-frequent collocations (e.g., only friend), and (3) non-collocates (e.g., true news, wrong friend) which had differing MI and Log Dice scores. Mixed-effects models were built to analyze the participants’ reaction times to the three conditions. The results showed that the frequency of the collocation (operationalized as item type) and its length significantly influenced reaction times, while both MI and Log Dice scores did not surface as significant predictors. This suggests that intermediate English L2 learners are not sensitive to corpus-based association measures. The results have important implications for L2 teaching and testing and may indicate that it is not worthwhile to determine which collocations to include in the materials based mainly on the strength of the association.