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Assessing Phraseological Development in Word Sequences of Variable Lengths in Second Language Texts Using Directional Association Measures
Author(s) -
Chen Alvin ChengHsien
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/lang.12340
Subject(s) - bigram , psychology , argumentative , association (psychology) , linguistics , sophistication , natural language processing , variation (astronomy) , word (group theory) , artificial intelligence , computer science , trigram , social science , philosophy , physics , sociology , astrophysics , psychotherapist
This study evaluated second language (L2) phraseological development using a directional association measure (delta P) that assesses the directional formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations. The study examined (a) whether learners develop their sensitivity to the distributional properties of recurrent multiword combinations as their proficiency grows and (b) how this development is mediated by the directionality of lexical associations and combination length. The formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations was assessed from bigrams to five‐grams in L2 argumentative essays by assigning them forward and backward delta P scores, computed from two representative native speaker corpora. Mixed‐effect modeling of delta P variation showed that formulaicity increased with proficiency. Although participants generally showed higher backward‐directed formulaicity, they demonstrated a more pronounced growth in forward‐directed formulaicity across proficiencies. Backward‐directed formulaicity, however, improved at a slower rate, suggesting sophistication in phrasal complexity. Longer sequences mitigated these directional differences.