Lexical access: The psycholinguistic reality of collocation  and semantic prosody (1)

Ellis, Nick C.; Frey, Eric; Jalkanen, Isaac

doi:10.1075/scl.35.07ell

In:Exploring the Lexis–Grammar Interface
Edited by Ute Römer-Barron and Rainer Schulze
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 35] 2009
► pp. 89–114

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The psycholinguistic reality of collocation  and semantic prosody (1)

Lexical access

Nick C. Ellis

Eric Frey

Isaac Jalkanen

Published online: 11 March 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.35.07ell

Our research investigates the psycholinguistic reality in language users of the phenomena of collocation and semantic prosody shown by corpus linguistics to be pervasive in language texts. This report concerns the earliest stages of word recognition and lexical access. It uses a lexical decision task to assess whether these processes are sensitive to particular collocations and to the generalizations of semantic prosody/association. The results demonstrate that native speakers preferentially process frequent verb-argument and booster/maximizer-adjective collocations. But the same paradigm that so readily shows sensitivity to particular collocations fails to demonstrate generalization. While memory for particular lexical associations affords fluent lexical access, there are no top-down semantic generalizations upon this level of processing. Our subsequent research shows semantic access to be the earliest cognitive locus of semantic association.

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The psycholinguistic reality of collocation and semantic prosody (1)

Lexical access

Cited by 36 other publications

The psycholinguistic reality of collocation  and semantic prosody (1)