Abstract：Abstract: Corpus linguistic investigations have reported that directionality, an important feature of collocation, is likely to expert significant impact on collocational processing. However, little research has been done to examine this issue. The present study tested the effect of collocational frequency and directionality on the processing of English verb-noun collocations. Both intermediate and advanced English-L2 speakers and English native speakers (NSs) did a primed lexical decision task with three types of constructions: right-predicative collocations, left-predicative collocations, and control phrases. For the NSs, all the collocations were processed significantly faster than the controls, while the right-predicative collocations were processed faster than the left-predicative ones. For the advanced L2 learners, only the right-predicative collocations were processed faster than the controls. The intermediate L2 learners spent comparable time in processing the two types of collocations and the controls. In addition, the priming effects in NSs were predicted by the scores of association strength and collocational frequency, while those in advanced L2 learners were only predicted by ΔP and collocational frequency.
Key Words: English verb-noun collocation; directionality; collocational frequency; association strength; processing
