The Effect of Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of the Multiword Units Extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English

Abstract

The primary purpose of the current study was to explore the psycholinguistic reality of the multiword units extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) by investigating how the frequency and L2 proficiency influenced the EFL learners’ processing of the multiword units. Forty Korean EFL university students and 18 native speakers of English in Korea participated in the current study. The participants were asked to decide whether the multiword units given were appropriate or not, and their reaction time and error rate were measured. It was found that not only the native speakers of English but also both the advanced and intermediate Korean EFL learners processed the high-frequency multiword units significantly faster than the low-frequency multiword units, and the errors rates on the high-frequency multiword units were significantly lower than those of the low-frequency multiword units even if there existed a significant difference in the reaction time and the error rate between the groups. The findings suggested that some of the high-frequency multiword units extracted from the COCA may exist as independent lexical entities in the mental lexicon of Korean EFL learners.