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Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 168:2 (2017) ► pp.248–277

Incidental acquisition of collocations in L2

Effects of adjacency and prior vocabulary knowledge

| Vilnius University

As collocations are very numerous, at least a part of them has to be learned incidentally when acquiring a second language. There is now an increasing body of evidence showing that incidental learning of collocations seems to be possible. The present study sets out to investigate whether collocations can be learned incidentally if encountered in their nonadjacent form (with words intervening between collocates). It also looks at the role of prior vocabulary knowledge in incidental acquisition of adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. The results show that nonadjacent collocations can be learned equally well as adjacent ones, at least to the recognition level of knowledge. Also, larger prior vocabulary knowledge seems to lead to better chances of learning both adjacent and nonadjacent collocations incidentally.

Keywords: collocations, incidental acquisition, nonadjacent collocations, adjacent collocations, vocabulary knowledge
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Defining collocations
    • 2.2Incidental acquisition of collocations in L2
    • 2.3Potential issues with learning nonadjacent items
    • 2.4The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Reading materials
    • 3.2Measures
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Participants
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1RQ1. To what extent can transparent collocations in an L2 be learned incidentally from reading academic texts?
      • 4.1.1Recognition level of knowledge
      • 4.1.2Recall level of knowledge
    • 4.2RQ2. Is there any difference between incidental learning of adjacent and nonadjacent verb-noun collocations in an L2?
    • 4.3RQ3. Does previous vocabulary knowledge have an effect on incidental collocation learning in an L2?
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Learning transparent collocations incidentally
    • 5.2Learning nonadjacent collocations incidentally
    • 5.3The role of prior vocabulary knowledge
    • 5.4Limitations
    • 5.5Implications
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.17005.vil
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