Measuring Mental Entrenchment of Phrases with Perceptual Identification, Familiarity Ratings, and Corpus Frequency Statistics

Word recognition is the Petri dish of the cognitive sciences. The processes hypothesized to govern naming, identifying and evaluating words have shaped this field since its origin in the 1970s. Techniques to measure lexical processing are not just the backbone of the typical experimental psychology laboratory, but are now routinely used by cognitive neuroscientists to study brain processing and increasingly by social and clinical psychologists (Eder, Hommel, and De Houwer 2007). Models developed to explain lexical processing have also aspired to be statements about the nature of human cognition (e.g., connectionist models, Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson 1996). Words were convenient objects to study for cognitive psychologists because they are well-defined and their nature as alphabetic strings was a good fit to analysis with the computer programming languages of the 1970s and 1980s which excelled at string manipulation. But are words actually the privileged unit of mental representation and processing that all of this scientific attention makes them out to be? Like a growing number of other language researchers, our answer is no (see, e.g., (Bybee and Hopper 2001; Wray 2002). We propose that the mental representations for lexical structures form a continuum, from word combinations which have fossilized into single units (nightclub) to those that both exist as independent units and yet have bonds, varying in tightness, with the words with which they frequently co-occur (Harris 1998). The first line of support for this view is the simple observation that fluent speakers easily recognize the familiarity and cohesive quality of word combinations in their language. Examples in English include common noun compounds (last year, brand new), verb phrases (cut down, get a hold of, faced with) and other multi-word expressions such as common sayings and references to cultural concepts (saved by the bell, speed of light; Jackendoff 1995). These frequently co-occurring word sequences, referred to as collocations or multi-word sequences, have only recently been studied by psycholinguists, but several recentpublications have argued that language processing and human cognition need to be expanded (if not altered) to accommodate speakers' wide-ranging knowledge of common word combinations (e.g., Arnon and Snider 2010; Bannard and Matthews 2008). Speakers' demonstrable facility with multiword expressions may be uncomfortable for many linguists and psycholinguists because of these fields' historical allegiance to parsimony in representation, as exemplified by the words and rules approach to language (Pinker 1999). This approach proposes that the building blocks of language are …