EFL Learners’ Mental Processing of Multi-word Units
Ping-Yu Huang, I-Huang Shih, and Chi-ting ChouChing Kuo Institute of Management and Health, Taiwan
The purpose of this study was to use sophisticated eye-tracking techniques toinvestigate how multi-word units (MWUs) were processed by learners who learned
English as a foreign language. During the recent two decades, there has been agrowing interest in exploring MWUs in language use. Research conducted to study
MWUs includes, for example, descriptions of MWUs in large-scale corpora (e.g.
Erman & Warren, 2000), discussions pointing out significance of MWUs for L2teaching (e.g. Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), analyses of discourse functions ofMWUs in either L1 or L2 productions (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004), etc. One
research issue which also has attracted considerable attention concerns how MWUs
are processed in real time. Specifically, it has been suggested that working memory isrestricted in its capacity, and, to ease the problem of the capacity limitation and toreceive/produce language fluently, human beings appear to develop a processing
advantage for multi-word sequences (Pawley & Syder, 1983). This advantage has
been evidenced by some recent psycholinguistic experiments (e.g. Conklin & Schmitt,2008; Jiang & Nekrasova, 2007), which found that this advantage was enjoyed not
only by L1 speakers, but by high-level L2 learners as well.
In this study, we would like to contribute to the literature on L2 learners’ MWU
processing while our experiment differed from the previous research in two importantrespects. First, unlike the previous studies which were conducted in ESL contexts, thisstudy tested EFL learners. Given that the L2 input of second language and foreign
language learners is largely different, it is necessary to find out whether foreign
language learners who rely mainly on written input also show the processing
advantage for MWUs. Second, rather than use high achievers as subjects, we focusedon intermediate-level L2 learners in an attempt to see if there was a need to reach highL2 levels to develop the processing advantage. The subjects of this study were thirtycollege students in Taiwan who had learned English as a foreign language for aroundsix years. We employed eye-tracking techniques to observe the subjects’ reading ofthirty MWUs, including both recurrent multi-word strings derived from British
National Corpus (e.g. as a matter of fact) and some common idioms (e.g. over the hill)
put in sentences. The last words of those MWUs were embedded in non-MWU
contexts for comparison (e.g. …whether this is a fact or…). Our assumption was, if
the subjects showed the processing advantage for the MWUs, they would process thefinal words of the MWUs more quickly than the same words in non-MWU contexts.
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The data collected were somewhat surprising. In the three eye movement measuresthat we observed (fixation probability, first-fixation duration, and gaze duration), noneof them revealed that the subjects processed the target words differently in the twocontexts. It appeared that our subjects did not show any advantage when they
processed the thirty MWUs. However, to see if there were certain MWUs that thesubjects processed more efficiently, we took a closer look at our eye movement dataand found that the MWUs for which our subjects did not show the advantage weremostly idioms. As for the corpus-derived multi-word sequences, the L2 learners didprocess their final words more quickly than the same words in non-MWU contexts.
Taking all the results together, we found: (1) EFL learners, like ESL learners, tend toenjoy a processing advantage when they perceive MWUs during silent reading, and (2)the processing advantage develops rather early in L2 acquisition, as it is shown by L2
learners at intermediate proficiency levels. Furthermore, our experiment indicates thatL2 learners generally have difficulty in processing idioms, thus confirming many
previous researchers’ claim that idiomatic expressions pose a serious problem for L2
learning (Cooper, 1999; Laufer, 2000). Based on these findings, we provide
suggestions for future research and offer some pedagogical insights for English L2
instruction.
References
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Conklin, K. & Schmitt, N. (2008). Formulaic sequences: Are they processed more
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Cooper, T. C. (1999). Processing of idioms by L2 learners of English. TESOL
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Erman, B. & Warren, B. (2000). The idiom principle and the open choice principle.
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Jiang, N. & Nekrasova, T. (2007). The processing of formulaic sequence by second
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