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Other: Disentangling the construct of Phraseological Sophistication

A Validation Study with Human Judgments

Phraseology, or formulaic language, has widely been recognised as playing an important role in language proficiency and development (Wray, 2002). Learner Corpus Research (LCR) has established that more proficient learners use more sophisticated and a wider range of collocations and recurrent word combinations (Bestgen & Granger, 2018; Paquot, 2019). This highlights the role of phraseological complexity, typically defined in terms of both range (diversity) and sophistication (Paquot, 2019). A learner’s text is considered more complex when it contains a higher proportion of sophisticated and varied phraseological units rather than frequent repetitions of common word combinations (Paquot, 2019).

This study focuses on the construct of Phraseological Sophistication, which has been theorised to be measured with three dimensions: register specificity, association strength, and frequency (Paquot & Naets, 2025). Collocations that are register-specific, strongly associated, and relatively infrequent are assumed to be more sophisticated. While previous work has suggested that this construct predicts learner proficiency (Paquot, 2018; Paquot, 2019; Vandeweerd et al., 2021; Jiang et al., 2021; Paquot et al., 2022), it is unclear whether human judgments align with this theoretical construct.

To address this gap, we are conducting a validation study in which 30 expert judges will evaluate 120 verb–object collocations using a comparative judgment task (Thwaites & Paquot, 2024). Comparative judgment is a novel approach that has proven useful for evaluating complex linguistic constructs (Crossley et al., 2023; Zhang & Lu, 2024). The study design will enable us to investigate (1) the extent to which L1 English speakers share intuitions about phraseological sophistication, and (2) the influence of register specificity, association strength, and frequency on those intuitions. This poster will present the study design, explain the methodological innovations, and outline expected contributions for assessing Phraseological Sophistication in learner language.

Info

Day: 2025-11-14
Start time: 12:15
Duration: 00:15
Room: M11.91
Track: Applied linguistics
Language: en

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