Processing collocations in typologically different languages, English and Turkish.

What is it about?

Although it is possible to use language in highly creative ways and convey the same meaning using different words each time, we rarely fulfil language's creative potential. That is, most language we encounter is repetitive and formulaic. These formulaic expressions include collocations (fast food), binomials (knife and fork), and idioms (kick the bucket). Collocations are fundamentally important to language processing due to their versatility—you can match multiple adjectives (good) with multiple nouns (day/boy). Repetitive use enables our brains to process what we hear easily because we expect certain words to follow each other. Thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a single word. Given this, we expected Turkish speakers to be less sensitive to phrasal frequencies than English speakers. We found that Turkish speakers were less sensitive to whole-phrase frequencies, as predicted, indicating that collocations are processed less holistically in Turkish than English. Both groups demonstrated that processing collocations involves combining information about individual words and phrases.

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Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We brought together corpus and experimental data to show that (i) typology impacts speakers' sensitivity to frequency information at different grain sizes, and (ii) crosslinguistically, speakers use statistical information to predict upcoming words."

Perspectives