The Advanced Foreign Learner's Mental Lexicon

This is the first psycholinguistic study that focuses on combinations of words and not on single lexemes. After comparing different approaches to collocation the hor develops a theoretical concept of collocation which will not only satisfy the theo- retical linguist but also the foreign language teacher. Basing his study on verb-noun collocations of English which are com- monly found in newspapers (such as to launder money, to hatch a plot or to plant a bomb) the hor probes into the mental lexicon of ad- vanced foreign learners of English. Over a period of more than two years experiments were conducted which aimed at exploring how col- locations are stored, networked in and retrieved from the students' mental lexicon. In addition diverse mnemonic strategies were developed and tested. A comparison between the performance of the test group students and the performance of the control group students reveals what types of strategies are particularly conducive to efficient collocation storage and retrieval. The psycholinguistic evidence has been drawn upon to develop a lan- guage production model which is rooted in the connectionist tradition. The investigations of the working mechanisms of the mental lexicon are rounded off by the blueprint for a dictionary of collocations on DVD which takes into account the insights gathered from the evaluation of the psycholinguistic data. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the hor will be of par- ticular interest to applied linguists and psycholinguists but also to foreign language teachers, lexicographers and lexicologists. Last but not least it will be a particularly rewarding book for anybody interested in the mental processes that take place in our brain before concrete linguistic utterances are produced.