LINGUIST List 15.2427

Tue Aug 31 2004

Review: Psycholinguistics: Schmitt (2004)

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley Collberg at collberglinguistlist.org.

Directory

  • TSCHICHOLD Cornelia, Formulaic Sequences

    Message 1: Formulaic Sequences

     Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 11:27:31 -0400 (EDT)
    From: TSCHICHOLD Cornelia <Cornelia.Tschicholdunine.ch>
    Subject: Formulaic Sequences


    EDITOR: Schmitt, Norbert TITLE: Formulaic Sequences SUBTITLE: Acquisition, processing and use SERIES: Language Learning & Language Teaching 9 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2004 Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-779.html

    Cornelia Tschichold, Department of English, Universit� de Neuch�tel, Switzerland

    ''Formulaic Sequences'' is an edited volume of twelve papers, with a focus on the acquisition of multi-word lexemes by non-native, adult learners. All the contributions to the volume broadly assume Sinclair's (1991) notion of language as functioning under a combination of the open-choice principle and the idiom principle, and most of them also draw on Wray (2002) for the consequences of this assumption for learners of a foreign language. The term ''formulaic sequence'' is adopted by most of the authors as a term that covers other more specific terms (such as ''phrasal lexeme'', ''lexical chunk'', ''collocation'', ''prefabricated language'', etc.) and is much more wide-ranging than the traditional phraseological units, i.e. phrasal verbs, idioms and metaphors.

    SUMMARY

    In the introduction, Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter give some background to the volume, outline the main problems in relation to formulaic sequences (definition, formal adaptability, psycholinguistic reality, functions in the discourse, learning burden) and provide an overview of the chapters. They also point out the numerous questions still totally open to research.

    In a paper on measurement methodology, John Read and Paul Nation describe the various difficulties linguists and lexicographers face when trying to decide what to include in their inventory of formulaic sequences. To ensure reliability in the process of deciding what is to be included in the phraseological lexicon, several trained raters need to arrive at the same conclusion for specific word groups. One of the main problems here is the amount of variation phraseological lexemes are subject to and the challenge this poses for both purely computational, corpus- based approaches and the definition of what to include within one's phraseological lexicon. (Wray's (2002) definition of formulaic sequence does not include sequences that have undergone transformations or substitutions of individual words.)

    Koenraad Kuiper, in a chapter on conventionalized varieties of speech, investigates the language used in professional fields where highly conventionalized phrases are an integral part of the speech people produce. He compares the language learnt and used by auctioneers and (certain) sports reporters to the linguistic apprenticeship that traditional story tellers and oral poets need to go through. Talking constitutes a significant part of their work and in order to produce fluent speech, a number of highly formulaic sequences and other conventions are used. These and examples from other professions (supermarket checkout operators, weather forecasters, script writers) show that newcomers must be initiated into the formulaic tradition, before they can use it and introduce their own variations. Kuiper also argues that many groups and subgroups of human societies have their own smaller or larger oral tradition. By looking at these rather extreme cases of formulaic sequences in use, it is hoped that some light can be shed on the more everyday varieties of conventionalized language.

    The next paper, by Norbert Schmitt, Zolt�n D�rnyei, Svenja Adolphs, and Valerie Durow, is the first in a series of studies from the University of Nottingham. The authors report on the acquisition of a set of formulaic sequences by international students learning English as a foreign language and preparing for their studies at a British university. The subjects in the study made progress during the period tested, but the results did not correlate with standard measurements of motivation.

    This somewhat surprising result gave rise to the next study, described here by Zolt�n D�rnyei, Valerie Durow, and Khawla Zahran. In a qualitative study, seven of the international students whose progress was followed in the initial study were interviewed in order to find out more about their motivation and degree of acculturation. Given that language aptitude on its own could not explain the degree of progress the learners made, the authors conclude that sociocultural adaptation and contact with the local native speakers were central to the learners' success, and only very high degrees of both motivation and language aptitude can make up for lack of acculturation.

    Going a step further, Svenja Adolphs and Valerie Durow then look in more detail at the progress in the use of formulaic sequences by two students with a widely diverging degree of sociocultural integration. They quantitatively investigate the students' use of three-word sequences over a period of seven months. Their results show that the student who integrated well into the host society made much better progress in her use of the most frequent type of formulaic sequences than the other student, who had relatively little social contact with native speakers.

    Following this group of studies on acquisition, Norbert Schmitt, Sarah Grandage, and Svenja Adolphs introduce the next group of Nottingham studies, directed at the processing of formulaic sequences. The authors report on a study that aimed to test the psycholinguistic validity of frequent word strings (derived from a corpus) for both native and non-native speakers. They selected 25 so-called recurrent clusters, based on several published sources of frequent clusters and inserted these into a story that was then used in a dictation task. The results from the native speaker group suggest that the clusters differ in their psycholinguistic coherence, possibly due to differing degrees of transparency. As could be expected, the non- native speakers scored lower on the dictation task, producing fewer wholly correct clusters, and more variation or hesitation, a result which can be interpreted as pointing to a non-holistic storage of the strings.

    Geoffrey Underwood, Norbert Schmitt and Adam Galphin then used the method of tracking eye movements during a reading task as the basis for their study. Their assumption was that the last word of a formulaic sequence would get less eye fixation time than the same word outside a formulaic sequence. The authors show that the last word in a formulaic sequence does indeed get less fixation time, thus confirming the hypothesis that the last word was expected by the reader. But the hypothesis was borne out only for the case of the native speaker readers. The results from the experiments with the non-native speakers were less conclusive and difficult to compare to the results of native speakers. Non-native readers obviously have considerably more fixations on the text as a whole, but the last words of formulaic sequences received fewer, not shorter fixations. Theories on reading and eye-movement do not seem to offer an explanation of this phenomenon.

    In the follow-up experiment, Norbert Schmitt and Geoffrey Underwood used self-paced reading (by clicking a key to see the next word on the screen) to find out whether formulaic sequences were processed faster than non-formulaic sequences. While the native speakers read faster than the non-natives, the terminal words in the lexical chunks did not show a difference. Given these inconclusive results, the authors point out that it is doubtful whether the methodology is a useful approach to their research question.

    In the next contribution, Carol Sp�ttl and Michael McCarthy compared subjects' knowledge of formulaic sequences across several languages. They report on the results of think- aloud protocols by multilingual participants who were asked to translate formulaic sequences from English into their L1 (German) and then into their L3 (and L4). The authors show that only some well-known and frequent expressions were translated holistically and without hesitation. Most expressions gave rise to some analysis and evaluation on the part of the participants.

    Typographic salience provides the background for Hugh Bishop's study on look-up behaviour and comprehension of formulaic sequences by language learners. While studies on single word salience and ensuing look-up behaviour do not show a clear advantage for marked texts, the author set up an experiment for formulaic sequences based on the assumption that learners do not necessarily recognize such unknown lexemes in a running text and therefore miss out on the noticing stage generally assumed to be essential to learning. Results show that there is indeed a clear difference in students' look-up behaviour if formulaic sequences are made salient. One reason for this is probably the fact that single words within a printed texts are set off by blanks, but multi-word units do not have this identifying feature and thus go unnoticed much more easily. Typographic salience could thus make a much more marked difference for multi-word units than for single words.

    Alison Wray's contribution is based on data from a beginning Welsh learner, who spent a few intensive days memorizing Welsh in order to appear on television. In the programme, ''Welsh in a Week'', individual learners are taught enough Welsh phrases to get them through a specific situation. The phrases were taught (and learnt presumably) as holistic units, and at the end of the week, the learner succeeded in giving her cookery demonstration in largely correct, fluent Welsh. Five months later, she still remembered most of her text, but despite the strongly holistic teaching approach, she introduced a small number of errors, a phenomenon which must be due to linguistic analysis. This suggests that learners, adults at least, do analyse chunks of language, even if it would serve their immediate goals better to just learn the text by heart.

    In the last chapter of the volume, Martha Jones and Sandra Haywood report on a study which tried to raise their students' awareness of formulaic sequences in academic texts. After evaluating some widely used textbooks for English for Academic Purposes (EAP), the authors chose a corpus of lexical chunks typical for this genre and worked on this set with their students, learners of English in a presessional course at Nottingham. While they clearly reached their goal of raising students' awareness, students' use of formulaic sequences in the posttest hardly improved.

    EVALUATION

    The volume as a whole is a very accessible collection of papers that show a good range of empirical studies on the acquisition and processing of formulaic sequences. In contrast to many other books on multi-word lexemes, this volume does not concentrate on the selection of the appropriate set of multi-word items, but focuses on second- language learners and the possible processes that facilitate the learning of formulaic sequences. While this is certainly one of the strengths of this volume, this focus might also have led to a less detailed consideration of the lexemes used in the various studies. Multi-word lexemes obviously come in many different types and sizes, with widely varying syntactic structures and vast differences in semantic opaqueness. Some contributions are clearly inspired by research on vocabulary and tend not to focus on the considerable differences between single words and multi-word units. Schmitt and Underwood's self-paced reading study, for example, does not seem to take into account the syntactic structure of the formulaic sequences used in the task, a factor that could certainly be expected to have an impact on the speed of reading. Other factors, such as the fact that translating is a rather specialized skill and does not come to even very fluent bilinguals in a natural way, could help to explain some of the results in the Sp�ttle and McCarthy study. Being forced to activate several languages in one's brain might impede easy access to long phrases. Given Sinclair's idiom principle and open- choice principle, language users typically have both routes open to them and choose the idiom principle for speed and ease of processing. For adult second-language learners, the situation could well be different. Analysing strings of language rather than learning them by heart might facilitate long-term retention or provide an alternate route to a formulaic sequence if holistic memory fails.

    A number of the studies in the volume give rather inconclusive results, an aspect which could be somewhat frustrating to the authors, but also tends to highlight the fact that we still have much to find out about formulaic sequences. We probably need an even more strongly interdisciplinary approach to such lexemes in order to reach more solid findings. But ending up with more questions after reading a book than one started out with is not necessarily a bad thing after all and should be seen as doing credit to this book.

    REFERENCES

    Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP.

    Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: CUP.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER

    Cornelia Tschichold teaches English linguistics at the University of Neuch�tel, Switzerland. Her research interests focus on English phraseology, computational lexicography and intelligent computer-assisted language learning.