Effects of task and corpus-derived association scores on the online processing of collocations

In the following self-paced reading study, we assess the cognitive realism of six widely used corpus-derived measures of association strength between words (collocated modifier–noun combinations like ): MI, MI3, Dice coefficient, -score, -score, and log-likelihood. The ability of these collocation m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory 2022-02, Vol.18 (1), p.33-76
Main Authors: McConnell, Kyla, Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
association scores
cognitive realism
Collocations
Comprehension
Corpus linguistics
Lexical processing
Nouns
Psycholinguistics
Self evaluation
self-paced reading
task effects
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Summary:In the following self-paced reading study, we assess the cognitive realism of six widely used corpus-derived measures of association strength between words (collocated modifier–noun combinations like ): MI, MI3, Dice coefficient, -score, -score, and log-likelihood. The ability of these collocation metrics to predict reading times is tested against predictors of lexical processing cost that are widely established in the psycholinguistic and usage-based literature, respectively: forward/backward transition probability and bigram frequency. In addition, the experiment includes the treatment variable of : it is split into two blocks which only differ in the format of interleaved comprehension questions (multiple choice vs. typed free response). Results show that the traditional corpus-linguistic metrics are outperformed by both backward transition probability and bigram frequency. Moreover, the multiple-choice condition elicits faster overall reading times than the typed condition, and the two winning metrics show stronger facilitation on the critical word (i.e. the noun in the bigrams) in the multiple-choice condition. In the typed condition, we find an effect that is weaker and, in the case of bigram frequency, longer lasting, continuing into the first spillover word. We argue that insufficient attention to task effects might have obscured the cognitive correlates of association scores in earlier research.
ISSN:1613-7027
1613-7035
DOI:10.1515/cllt-2018-0030