Collocational Links in the Multilingual Mind: Frequency Intuitions and Association Strength Measures

Collocations are ubiquitous in everyday language, which help language users sound more natural and ease the processing burden during production. They also commonly taught foreign classrooms those learners who can master these prevalent word combinations chunks get to use fluently as they enjoy a advantage. There different approaches definition of frequently co-occurring combinations, but current study embraces frequentist approach adopts corpus linguistic technique tries combine linguistics user intuition data its interpretations. have been extensively investigated from many angles using both psycholinguistics techniques so far. Having spark theory collocational priming, present attempts (a) investigate relationship between corpus-driven association measures frequency judgements L1 Turkish-L2 English-L3 Italian users, (b) analyse possible effect congruence across languages on relationship, (c) question if there is difference users’ L3 sensitivity towards strength based their intuitions (d) find humble evidence for psycholinguistic reality collocations mental lexicon, any. The results indicate that L2 English correlate with an measure (t-score) congruent items judged accurately. Additionally, overlap native certain extent. findings discussed light earlier research usage-based intuition.