Table Of ContentFrequency Effects in Language Learning and Processing
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 244.1
Editor
Volker Gast
Founding Editor
Werner Winter
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Heiko Narrog
Matthias Schlesewsky
Niina Ning Zhang
Editor responsible for this volume
Matthias Schlesewsky
De Gruyter Mouton
Frequency Effects
in Language Learning
and Processing
edited by
Stefan Th. Gries
Dagmar Divjak
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-027376-2
e-ISBN 978-3-11-027405-9
ISSN 1861-4302
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Table of contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Stefan Th. Gries
What can we count in language, and what counts in language
acquisition, cognition, and use?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Nick C. Ellis
Are e¤ects of word frequency e¤ects of context of use?
An analysis of initial fricative reduction in Spanish. . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
William D. Raymond and Esther L. Brown
What statistics do learners track? Rules, constraints and schemas in
(artificial) grammar learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Relative frequency e¤ects in Russian morphology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Eugenia Antic´
Frequency, conservative gender systems, and the language-learning
child: Changing systems of pronominal reference in Dutch . . . . . . . 109
Gunther De Vogelaer
Frequency E¤ects and Transitional Probabilities in L1 and L2
Speakers’ Processing of Multiword Expressions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Ping-Yu Huang, David Wible and Hwa-Wei Ko
You talking to me? Corpus and experimental data on the zero
auxiliary interrogative in British English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Andrew Caines
The predictive value of word-level perplexity in human sentence
processing: A case study on fixed adjective-preposition constructions
in Dutch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Maria Mos, Antal van den Bosch and Peter Berck
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Introduction
Stefan Th. Gries
The papers in this volume and its companion (Divjak & Gries 2012) were
originally part of a theme session ‘Converging and diverging evidence:
corpora and other (cognitive) phenomena?’ at the Corpus Linguistics
2009conferenceinLiverpoolaswellaspartofathemesession‘Frequency
e¤ects in language’ planned for the International Cognitive Linguistics
Conference at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. We are very
fortunate to have received a large number of very high-quality submis-
sions to these events as well as to these two volumes and wish to thank
our contributors for their contributions and their patience during the time
thatwastakenupbyrevisionsandthepreparationofthefinalmanuscript.
Usually, the purpose of an introduction to such an edited volume is to
survey current trends in the relevant field(s), provide brief summaries of
the papers included in the volume, and situate them with regard to what
is currently happening in the field. The present introduction deviates from
this tradition because one of the papers solicited for these two theme
session was solicited as such an overview paper. Thus, in this volume,
this overall introduction will res trict itself to brief characterizations of the
paper and a few additional comments – the survey of the field and the
identification of current trends and recent developments on the other
hand can be found in Ellis’s state-of-the-art overview. Ellis discusses the
interrelation of frequency and cognition – in cognition in general as well
as in (second) language cognition – and, most importantly given current
discussions in usage-based approaches to language, provides a detailed
account of the factors that drive the kind of associative learning assumed
by many in the field: type and token frequency, Zipfian distributions as
well as recency, salience, perception, redundancy etc. Just as importantly,
Ellis derives a variety of conclusions or implications of these factors for
our modeling of learning and acquisition processes, which sets the stage
for the papers in this volume.
The other papers cover a very large range of approaches and methods.
Most of them are on synchronic topics, but de Vogelaer focuses on fre-
quency e¤ects in language change. Several studies are on native speakers’
linguistic behavior, but some involve data from non-adult native language
speakers,secondlanguagelearners,andnativespeakers(ofEnglish)learn-
2 StefanTh.Gries
inganartificiallanguage.Manystudiesinvolvecorpusdataintheformof
various types of frequency data, but many also add experimental or other
approachesasdiverseasacceptabilityjudgments,shadowing,questionnaires,
eye-tracking, sentence-copying, computational modeling, and artificial
language learning; most of them also involve sophisticated statistical
analysisofvariouskinds(correlationsanddi¤erenttypesoflinearmodels,
logisticregressions,linearmixed-e¤ectmodels,clusteranalyticaltechniques).
The following summarizes the papers in this volume, which proceeds from
phonological topics (Raymond & Brown and Kapatsinksi) via morphologi-
cal studies (Antic´ and de Vogelaer) to syntactic/n-gram studies (Huang,
Wible, & Ko as well as Caines and Mos, van den Bosch, & Berck).
Raymond & Brown explore a range of frequency-related factors and
their impact on initial fricative reduction in Spanish. They begin by point-
ing out that results of previous studies have been inconclusive, in part
because many di¤erent studies have included only partially overlapping
predictors and controls; in addition, the exact causal nature of frequency
e¤ects has also proven elusive. They then study data on [s]-initial Spanish
wordsfromthefreeconversationsfromtheNewMexico-ColoradoSpanish
Survey, a database of interviews and free conversations initiated in 1991.
A large number of di¤erent frequency-related variables is coded for each
instance of an s-word, including word frequency, bigram frequency, transi-
tionalprobability(inbothdirections),andothers,andtheseareenteredinto
a binary logistic regressiontotry to predict fricative reduction.
The results show that s-redu ction is influenced by many predictors, too
manytodiscusshereindetail.However,one veryinterestingconclusionis
that, once a variety of contextual frequency measures is taken into con-
sideration, then non-contextual measures did not contribute much to
the regression model anymore, which is interesting since it forces us to
re-evaluate our stance on frequency, from a pure repetition-based view
to a more contextually-informed one, which in itself would constitute a
huge conceptual development (cf. also below).
Kapatsinski’s study involves a comparison of product-oriented vs.
source-orientedgeneralizationsbymeansofanartificial-languagelearning
experiment. Native speakers of English are exposed to small artificial lan-
guages that feature a palatalization process but di¤er in terms of whether
thesoundfavoringpalatalizationisalsofoundattachingtothesoundthat
would be the result of the palatalization. The exposition to the artificial
languages (with small interactive video-clips) favors either a source-
oriented generalization or a product-oriented generalization. The results
as obtained from cluster analyses of rating and production probabilities
Introduction 3
provide strong support for product-oriented generalizations (esp. when
sources and products are not close to each other).
The paper by Antic´ studies the productivity of two Russian verb pre-
fixes, po vs. voz/vos/vz/vs and the morphological decomposition. She first
comparesthetwoprefixesintermsofavarietyofdesiderataofproductivity
measures (e.g., intuitiveness and hapaxability). She then uses simple linear
regressions for both prefixes and shows, on the basis of intercepts and
slopes, that po is indeed the more productive a‰x.
In a second case study, Antic´ reports on a prefix-separation experiment
in which subjects’ reaction time is the critical dependent variable. On
the basis of a linear mixed-e¤ects regression, she identifies a variety of
parameters that significantly a¤ect subjects’ RTs, such as semantic trans-
parency of the verbs, unprefixed family size, and the di¤erence between
the frequency of the base verb and the frequency of the prefixed form.
Three di¤erent theoretical accounts of the data are discussed, with the
final analysis opting for a Bybee/Langacker type of network model of
morphological representation.
De Vogelaer studies the gender systems of Dutch dialects. More specif-
ically, he starts out from the fact that Standard Dutch exhibits a gender
mismatch of the binary article system and the ternary pronominal system
and explores to what degree this historical change is a¤ected by frequency
e¤ects. Results from a questionnaire study, in which subjects were put in
a position to decide on the gender of nouns, indicate high- and low-
frequency items behave di¤eren tly: the former are a¤ected in particular
by standardization whereas the latter are influenced more by resemantici-
zation. However, the study also cautions us that di¤erent types of data
can yield very di¤erent results with regard to the e¤ect of frequency. De
Vogelaercomparesfrequencydatafromthe9-million-wordSpokenDutch
Corpus to age-of-acquisition data from a target vocabulary list. Correla-
tion coe‰cients indicate that the process of standardization is more corre-
lated with the adult spoken corpus frequencies whereas resemanticization
is more correlated with the age-of-acquisition data. As De Vogelaer puts
it,‘‘frequencye¤ectsaretypicallypoly-interpretable,’’andherightlyadvises
readers to regularly explore di¤erent frequency measures and register-
specific frequencies.
The study by Huang, Wible, & Ko is concerned with transitional prob-
abilities between words at the end of multi-word expressions, or n-grams,
with the focus being on the contrast between frequent and entrenched
cases such as on the other hand and less frequent and entrenched cases
such as examined the hand. A first eye-tracking study tested whether L1
4 StefanTh.Gries
and L2 speakers of English react di¤erently to these di¤erent degrees of
predictability of hand. Results from ANOVAs on fixation probabilities,
first-fixation durations, and gaze durations reveal that both speaker groups
respond strongly to the di¤erence in predictability that results from the
entrenched multi-word expressions.
A follow-up case study explores these results in more detail by investi-
gating some multi-word expression that had not exhibited a sensitivity
towards transitional probabilities in the first experiment. L2-speakers were
exposed to such expressions during a training phase (with two di¤erent
types of exposure) and then tested with the same experimental design as
before. The results show that frequent exposure during the training phase
facilitated their processing, and more so than a less frequent but textually
enhanced exposure to the stimuli. Both studies therefore show that the
well-researched ability of speakers to detect/utilize transitional probabilities
is also observed for L2 speakers and that basic assumptions of usage-based
approaches as to how input frequency a¤ects processing are supported.
Caines’s study is another one that combines corpus and experimental
data.Hisfocusisthezero-auxiliaryinterrogativeinspokenBritishEnglish
(e.g., you talkin’ to me?). His first case study is based on a multifactorial
analysis of nearly ten thousand cases of progressive interrogatives in the
spoken part of the BNC. Using a binary logistic regression, he identifies
several predictors that significantly a¤ect the probability of zero-auxiliary
forms, including, for example, the presence of a subject, second person, as
well as the number of the verb .
To shed more light on the construction’s characteristics, Caines also
reports on two experiments, an acceptability judgment task (using magni-
tude estimation) and a continuous shadowing task. An ANOVA of the
acceptability judgment largely corroborates the corpus-based results, as
do restoration and error rates in the shadowing tasks, providing a clear
example of how methodological pluralism can shed light on di¤erent
aspects of one and the same phenomenon.
Mos, van den Bosch, & Berck’s study is also devoted to a multi-word
expression, namely to what they call the Fixed Adjective Preposition
(FAP) construction in Dutch, as exemplified by de boer is trots op zijn
auto (‘the farmer is proud of his car’). They employ a rare and creative
way to investigate how speakers partition sentences into parts: subjects
are asked to copy a sentence, and the dependent variable is the points at
which subjects revisit the sentence they are copying, the assumption being
that this will fall between constituents more often than interrupt them. In
this case, the subjects – 6th graders – were asked to copy fairly frequent
