Effects of Collocation Frequencies on the Processing of Noun Phrases and Active Sentences

摘要

The present study investigated the effects of collocation frequencies on the processing of noun phrases and active sentences. Keeping word frequencies of lexical items the same, Experiment 1 indicated that noun phrases with high collocation frequencies were processed more quickly and accurately than those with low collocation frequencies. Experiment 2 further examined the processing of active sentences with high and low collocation frequencies. Again, active sentences with high collocation frequencies were processed more quickly and accurately than those with low collocation frequencies. As such, both experiments clearly illustrated co-activations of two lexical items affecting the noun phrases and active sentences. Independent of syntactic structure, spread activation in the semantic lexical network must affect the processing of noun phrases and active sentences.