Learnability of L2 collocations and L1 influence on L2 collocational representations of Japanese learners of English

Abstract This study, based on Jiang’s (2000. Lexical representation and development in a second language. Applied Linguistics 21(1). 47–77) bilingual lexicon model, investigates the learnability of collocations among 34 Japanese EFL learners and examines the influence of their L1 on such learning. An acceptability judgment task assessed the knowledge of three different types of collocations: English-only collocations that cannot be directly translated into Japanese (e.g., flat rate); congruent collocations that can be translated into Japanese without changing their meaning (e.g., cold tea); and Japanized collocations that are infelicitous in English, but felicitous in Japanese (e.g., yellow voice). After the task, participants translated the collocations and rated the difficulty on a four-point Likert scale. The relationship between the accuracy of these collocations and the translation difficulty rating scores was analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression modeling to assess L1 influence. The results showed that with increasing L2 proficiency, learners tend to regard congruent and English-only collocations as acceptable, but even highly proficient learners did not fully reject the Japanized collocations. This suggests that as L2 proficiency increased, participants learned to accept felicitous collocations but did not learn to reject Japanized infelicitous ones. In addition, the influence of L1 was evident in English-only and Japanized collocations and could not be avoided by those with increasing proficiency.