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FREQUENCY EFFECTS on ESL COMPOSITIONAL MULTI-WORD SEQUENCE PROCESSING by Sarut Supasiraprapa a DISSERTATION Submitted to Michiga

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FREQUENCY EFFECTS on ESL COMPOSITIONAL MULTI-WORD SEQUENCE PROCESSING by Sarut Supasiraprapa a DISSERTATION Submitted to Michiga FREQUENCY EFFECTS ON ESL COMPOSITIONAL MULTI-WORD SEQUENCE PROCESSING By Sarut Supasiraprapa A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Second Language Studies – Doctor of Philosophy 2017 ABSTRACT FREQUENCY EFFECTS ON ESL COMPOSITIONAL MULTI-WORD SEQUENCE PROCESSING By Sarut Supasiraprapa The current study investigated whether adult native English speakers and English- as-a-second-language (ESL) learners exhibit sensitivity to compositional English multi- word sequences, which have a meaning derivable from word parts (e.g., don’t have to worry as opposed to sequences like He left the US for good, where for good cannot be taken apart to derive its meaning). In the current study, a multi-word sequence specifically referred to a word sequence beyond the bigram (two-word) level. The investigation was motivated by usage-based approaches to language acquisition, which predict that first (L1) and second (L2) speakers should process more frequent compositional phrases faster than less frequent ones (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Ellis, 2002; Gries & Ellis, 2015). This prediction differs from the prediction in the mainstream generative linguistics theory, according to which frequency effects should be observed from the processing of items stored in the mental lexicon (i.e., bound morphemes, single words, and idioms), but not from compositional phrases (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993; Prasada, Pinker, & Snyder, 1990). The present study constituted the first attempt to investigate frequency effects on multi-word sequences in both language comprehension and production in the same L1 and L2 speakers. The study consisted of two experiments. In the first, participants completed a timed phrasal-decision task, in which they decided whether four-word target phrases were possible English word sequences. This task measured how fast participants receptively process a phrase, with their reaction time being the outcome measure. In the second experiment, the same participants completed an oral elicitation task, in which they saw and orally produced target phrases. The outcome measure was the production durations of the first three words (e.g., don’t have to worry) in the same target phrases used in the first experiment. Participants were a sample of native English speakers (N=51) and ESL learners (N=52) who can be characterized as being proficient enough to study in an English academic environment (mean internet-based TOEFL scores = 95.52, SD = 6.63) and who had lived in the US for 2-3 years (mean = 2.61 years, SD = 0.56). The results from the first experiment suggested phrase frequency effects in both participant groups and countered the proposal that L2 learners cannot retain information about L2 word occurrences in their memory (Wray, 2002). These results support the prediction from usage-based approaches and further corroborate previous proposals that frequency data from large native English corpora should be representative of the regularities of English input that speakers in general are exposed to (Hoey, 2005; Wolter & Gyllstad, 2013). Moreover, the results entail a need for future L1 and L2 psycholinguistics model to accommodate phrase frequency effects. On the other hand, in the second experiment, both participant groups did not exhibit phrase frequency effects. In light of previous similar compositional multi-word sequence production studies (e.g., Bannard & Matthew, 2008; Ellis, Simpson–Vlach, & Maynard, 2008), which had yielded mixed results, and the results from the first experiment, the absence of the effects in the second experiment could have stemmed from cross-study methodological differences, including the type of experimental tasks used to investigate multi-word sequence frequency effects. Copyright by SARUT SUPASIRARPAPA 2017 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation was possible due to the support and help from many. First, my gratitude goes to my dissertation committee members. I am thankful to Charlene Polio for her guidance and for always having strong faith in me since I first entered this academic field in 2008. I am also grateful to Aline Godfroid for her detailed and insightful suggestions and for encouraging me to continue pursuing research in this area. My thanks also go to Shawn Loewen, who provided useful advice on the design of my study and statistical analyses. In addition, I thank Susan Gass for her suggestions and for her leadership of the Second Language Studies program, which has brought about several forms of support and opportunities for students, including a summer fellowship which allowed me to carry out this dissertation project in the summer of 2016. Several other professors and friends also made significant contributions to this dissertation. Without Karthik Durvasula, with whom I took a phonology class as an MATESOL student, and Qian Luo from the linguistics department, the speech production experiment in this dissertation would have been a serious practical challenge. My thanks also go to Jens Schmidtke, who was always willing to provide suggestions about the R program no matter where he was, be it the US, Mozambique, Germany, or Jordan. Moreover, Nicole Jess at the MSU Center for Statistical Training and Consulting gave me useful advice about mixed effects regression modeling. I also thank Attakrit Leckcivilize for his statistical insight and the friendship we have formed since high school, as well as Suzanne Wagner and Suzanne Johnston for their respective suggestions on the Linguistics Data Consortium and Superlab. In addition, Stella He and several of my Thai v friends at MSU, including Pui, Kwan, Sorrachai, and Supawadee, helped me with participant recruitment. I would also like to thank professors with whom I took classes during my time in the MATESOL and the SLS programs at MSU, including Cristina Schmitt, Debra Hardison, Patti Spinner, and Dianne Larsen–Freeman. The knowledge I gained from them has broadened my academic perspectives, increased my interest in linguistics and language acquisition, and influenced this dissertation, directly or indirectly, in various ways. In addition, I am grateful to many good friends in Thailand for their encouragement and support during the past four years, including Torsak, Gaew, Kwang, Win, Seth, Sa, and Mon. Many people I befriended with at MSU also made my time in the US more fun and meaningful, particularly Ben, Se Hoon, Prare, Big, Yui, Kung, Tim, Pom, Tink, and Aoi. I also thank Sakol Suethanapornkul for his encouragement and inspiring academic determination. On some occasions, it was words of wisdom from these people that gave me the energy to go on. Finally, I thank my parents, Saner Supasiraprapa and Weena Supasiraprapa, and my sister, Sukumal Supasiraprapa, for their unending love, patience, and support. I am also grateful to my uncle, Vithul Liwgasemsarn, for helping my mom and my sister in many ways when my dad passed away in 2013 and I had to be away from home to pursue this doctoral degree. This dissertation was financially supported by the College of Arts and Letters with a Dissertation Completion Fellowship. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ix LIST OF FIGURES x INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 4 1.1 L1 acquisition from a usage-based perspective 4 1.2 Previous work on frequency effects on compositional word sequence 11 processing in native English speakers 1.3 Frequency in L2 acquisition 18 1.4 Previous work on frequency effects on ESL word sequence comprehension 28 1.5 Previous work on the role of frequency in ESL word sequence production 38 1.6 Research questions in the current study 42 CHAPTER 2: EXPERIMENT I 44 2.1 Research question and prediction 44 2.2 Method 45 2.2.1 Participants 45 2.2.2 Materials 48 2.2.2.1 Target phrases 48 2.2.2.2 Fillers 56 2.2.2.3 Background questionnaires 56 2.2.3 Procedure 57 2.3 Analysis 62 2.4 Results 70 2.5 Discussion 75 CHAPTER 3: EXPERIMENT II 84 3.1 Research question and prediction 84 3.2 Method 85 3.2.1 Participants 85 3.2.2 Materials 85 3.2.3 Procedure 86 3.3 Analysis 90 3.4 Results 101 3.5 Discussion 105 CHAPTER 4: GENERAL DISCUSSION 115 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 123 5.1 Summary of findings 123 vii 5.2 Implications 125 5.3 Limitations and future research 128 APPENDICES 136 APPENDIX A: The 28 target pairs 137 APPENDIX B: Frequency (F) of the target phrases and their sub-parts 139 APPENDIX C: Fillers in Experiment I 141 APPENDIX D: Background questionnaire for native English speakers 142 APPENDIX E: Background questionnaire for ESL learners 145 APPENDIX F: Transformation of regression coefficients for result interpretations 148 APPENDIX G: Fillers in Experiment II 150 REFERENCES 151 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Examples constructions at varying levels of complexity and abstraction 7 (Goldberg, 2003, 2013) Table 2. Previous studies investigating frequency effects on ESL compositional 30 phrase comprehension Table 3. ESL learners’ background (N=52) 46 Table 4. Examples of the 28 target pairs 51 Table 5. Explanatory variables in the first experiment 64 Table 6. Average reaction times in milliseconds from the phrasal acceptability 71 judgment task (SD in parentheses) Table 7. Mixed effects model results for the high cut-off bin in the phrasal 73 acceptability task Table 8. Mixed effects model results for the low cut-off bin in the phrasal 75 acceptability task Table 9. Explanatory variables in the second experiment 97 Table 10. Average production durations of the target segments in milliseconds 102 from the elicited production task (SD in parentheses) Table 11. Mixed effects model results for the high cut-off bin in the elicited 103 production task Table 12. Mixed effects model results for the low cut-off bin in the elicited 105 production task Table 13. Target pairs in the high cut-off bin 137 Table 14.
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