Fan Kunmeng, Wang Haixiao
School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
School of Foreign Languages, Anhui University of Technology, Ma'anshan, China.
Front Psychol. 2024 Feb 21;15:1281926. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1281926. eCollection 2024.
There has been much debate in psycholinguistic research on whether formulaic sequences (FSs) are processed holistically or in a compositional manner. Whereas most previous studies on this issue focused on the receptive processing of FSs, few have investigated the productive processing of FSs, particularly in the second language (L2) learning context. Besides, most previous studies on L2 FSs examined learner-external FSs, or those identified by external criteria such as corpus frequency with little attention to learner-internal FSs, or psychological units perceived as wholes by learners themselves, although there might be much overlap between learner-external and learner-internal FSs. This study was designed to explore the productive processing of FSs by L2 learners from their own perspective, while taking into account the effects of L2 proficiency and topic familiarity. It made a distinction between internal FSs and purely external FSs as the primary criterion of categorizing learners' processing behaviors. Ten Chinese English learners from two proficiency levels completed two writing tasks differing in topic familiarity. Upon the completion of each task, each participant and the researcher identified the FSs separately and then distinguished internal FSs and purely external FSs (termed as assembled FSs, since they were perceived as being assembled from scratch) collectively. Next, each participant performed video stimulated recall (VSR) for the production process of each FS. The results showed that the learners' conscious processing (i.e., retrieval/assembly and integration into the text) of FSs can be categorized on two levels (lexical and syntactic). There was more holistic processing than compositional processing on the lexical level, but not on the syntactic level, indicating the learners' sizable storages of FSs and the syntactic flexibility of FSs. Furthermore, between-group differences and between-task differences were detected on two processing levels: higher-proficiency students retrieved more internal FSs and made more modifications to them than their lower-proficiency counterparts; in the familiar-topic writing, learners retrieved more internal FSs and made less modifications to them. Based on the findings, a model of L2 FS production is proposed, and pedagogical implications for the teaching of L2 FSs are provided.
心理语言学研究中，对于公式化序列（FSs）是整体加工还是组合加工存在诸多争论。尽管之前关于这个问题的大多数研究聚焦于FSs的接受性加工，但很少有研究调查FSs的产出性加工，尤其是在第二语言（L2）学习背景下。此外，之前关于二语FSs的大多数研究考察的是学习者外部的FSs，即那些由外部标准（如语料库频率）确定的FSs，而很少关注学习者内部的FSs，即学习者自己视为整体的心理单元，尽管学习者外部和内部的FSs可能有很多重叠之处。本研究旨在从二语学习者自身的角度探索FSs的产出性加工，同时考虑二语水平和话题熟悉度的影响。本研究将内部FSs和纯粹外部FSs区分开来，作为对学习者加工行为进行分类的主要标准。来自两个水平的十名中国英语学习者完成了两项话题熟悉度不同的写作任务。在每项任务完成后，每位参与者和研究者分别识别出FSs，然后共同区分内部FSs和纯粹外部FSs（称为组合FSs，因为它们被视为是从零开始组合而成的）。接下来，每位参与者对每个FS的产出过程进行视频刺激回忆（VSR）。结果表明，学习者对FSs的有意识加工（即检索/组合以及融入文本）可以在两个层面（词汇和句法）上进行分类。在词汇层面上，整体加工比组合加工更多，但在句法层面上并非如此，这表明学习者对FSs有大量的存储以及FSs在句法上具有灵活性。此外，在两个加工层面上检测到了组间差异和任务间差异：高水平学生比低水平学生检索到更多的内部FSs并对其进行了更多修改；在熟悉话题写作中，学习者检索到更多的内部FSs并对其进行了更少的修改。基于这些发现，提出了一个二语FS产出模型，并为二语FS教学提供了教学启示。
