Lexical Associations in the L1 Turkish Mental Lexicon: Can L1 Lexical Intuition and a Representative Corpus Guide Teaching of Turkish as a Foreign Language Materials?

Abstract

Studies to date using corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches have investigated the collocational links in both the L1 and L2 brain from different angles. They have attempted to test the role collocations play in the mental lexicon and question how corpus data can guide us in our investigations. However, there have been almost no attempts to explore the relationship between the L1 Turkish users’ subjective judgements of collocational use (frequency) and the association strength of collocational items in Turkish evidenced in representative corpora. This research, mainly with a corpus-linguistic approach, aims to (a) detect the possible relationship between the collocational links in the L1 Turkish mental lexicon and the collocational frequency profiles on the TNC (Turkish National Corpus) (b) and thus question if L1 speaker intuitions (familiarity) regarding collocational frequency and the frequency profiles of the items, as evidenced through representative corpora, can/should be exploited in an attempt to create target vocabulary lists or vocabulary teaching materials for teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The results indicate that the collocational links in L1 Turkish users’ mental lexicon seem to resemble the lexical associations represented in the TNC. To be more precise, higher Delta-P (1 > word 2) scores are associated with stronger collocational intuitions. Additionally, the Delta-P (1 > word 2) as well as the CEFR 1 level are significant predictors of subjective judgements for frequent collocational use. The results have been discussed in light of the psycholinguistic research highlighting collocational processing, and some pedagogical conclusions have been drawn.