Processing of MWUs

One main line of research investigates how native and non-native speakers process of multiword units, with a special focus on “collocations” – that is, the conventional word combinations that speakers use in a given linguistic community. For instance, consider the inadvertent lexical choices of native English speakers in phrases such as “shoot a movie” or “pay a visit”, which a speaker of another language, such as Spanish, would rather express as, literally, ‘roll a movie’ or ‘make a visit’. Acquiring such collocations often requires L2 speakers to learn new meanings and usage contexts for familiar words, as well as to understand or make lexical choices that differ from how they use their native language. 

This line of work addresses questions such as: How does the native language facilitate, or interfere, with processing of the second language? In what cases does partial similarity between both languages result in a greater ease or a greater cost in processing? And how does processing change at different levels of proficiency? 

I seek answers to these questions by using a variety of methods, including off-line behavioral measures such as reading times or accuracy, as well as on-line techniques (eye-tracking and event-related potentials).

Related publications

Pulido, Manuel F. & López-Beltrán, Priscila (accepted). When native speakers are not “native-like”: Chunking ability predicts (lack of) sensitivity to gender agreement during online processing. Cognitive Science.

Pulido, Manuel F. (2023) Generalizing knowledge of L2 collocations: The roles of within- and cross-language similarity on acceptability and ERPs. Language Learning. Pre-print pdf

Pulido, Manuel. F. (2022). Processing conventional and non-conventional multiword units: Evidence of similarity-based generalization from judgements and brain potentials. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. First View. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2157028 Pre-print pdf

Pulido, Manuel F. (2021). Individual chunking ability predicts efficient or shallow L2 processing: Eye-tracking evidence from multiword units in relative clauses. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 4004. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.607621

Pulido, Manuel F. & Paola E. Dussias. (2019), The Neural Correlates of Conflict Detection and Resolution During Multiword Lexical Selection: Evidence from Bilinguals and Monolinguals. Brain Sciences, 9, 110. DOI: 10.3390/brainsci9050110

Paola E. Dussias, Beatty-Martínez, Anne, Michael A. Johns, Manuel F. Pulido, (2019). “Sentence Processing in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers”, Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0231