Abstract
This study examines whether semantic relatedness facilitates or impedes the acquisition of English collocations by conducting two experiments respectively on Chinese undergraduates. Each experiment was composed of a reading session, a productive test, and a receptive test. Experiment 1 began with the reading session of 28 paired-up words and their collocations (in sentence context). Those words were counterbalanced between two randomly selected groups by cross-matching on semantic relatedness. Results of the productive test revealed that the participants scored significantly higher on test items that were semantically related than the randomly cross-paired counterparts. However, for the receptive test, the participants performed significantly better on semantically unrelated items. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that the word pairs selected were only semantically related and did not have any shared morphemes. Experiment 2 also revealed consistent results. The results of the two experiments consistently illustrate that semantic relatedness may exert a facilitatory effect on language output but an inhibitory effect on the process of language input.
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Our special thanks go to Prof. Li Yang and Prof. Zhang Juan for their help in data collection.
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Jiang, Mc., Jong, My., Tse, Cs. et al. Examining the Effect of Semantic Relatedness on the Acquisition of English Collocations. J Psycholinguist Res 49, 199–222 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09680-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09680-9