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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.269-284
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 16 Feb 2023 Revised 12 Apr 2023 Accepted 18 Apr 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202304.269

The Effect of Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of the Multiword Units Extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English

Shinwoong Lee
Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Hanyang University, Tel: 02-2220-0745 shinwoonglee@hanyang.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The primary purpose of the current study was to explore the psycholinguistic reality of the multiword units extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) by investigating how the frequency and L2 proficiency influenced the EFL learners’ processing of the multiword units. Forty Korean EFL university students and 18 native speakers of English in Korea participated in the current study. The participants were asked to decide whether the multiword units given were appropriate or not, and their reaction time and error rate were measured. It was found that not only the native speakers of English but also both the advanced and intermediate Korean EFL learners processed the high-frequency multiword units significantly faster than the low-frequency multiword units, and the errors rates on the high-frequency multiword units were significantly lower than those of the low-frequency multiword units even if there existed a significant difference in the reaction time and the error rate between the groups. The findings suggested that some of the high-frequency multiword units extracted from the COCA may exist as independent lexical entities in the mental lexicon of Korean EFL learners.

Keywords:

multiword units, psycholinguistic reality, EFL learners, frequency, L2 proficiency, reaction time, error rate, COCA

Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A2A01044244).

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