The effects of adjacent and non-adjacent collocations on processing: eye-tracking evidence from "nested" collocations

Pulido, Manuel F, Macis, Marijana ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9141-2403 and Sonbul, Suhad (2025) The effects of adjacent and non-adjacent collocations on processing: eye-tracking evidence from "nested" collocations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. ISSN 0278-7393 (In Press)

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Abstract

There is now robust evidence of priming effects during sentence processing for adjacent words that form collocations (statistically associated combinations). However, there is very limited evidence regarding how non-adjacent collocations might facilitate processing. Furthermore, no previous research has examined how non-adjacent collocations interplay with other (non)collocational material in the surrounding context. We employed "nested" collocations for the first time, in which more than one contextual element (verb, adjective) is a potential collocate for a noun. For example, in a Verb-Adjective-Noun (V-A-N) phrase, two collocations may be "nested" ("express concerns" + "valid concerns" = "express valid concerns") or only the verb (non-adjacent) or adjective (adjacent) might be collocational. In an eye-tracking experiment with L1 English speakers, we manipulated the collocational status of adjectives adjacent to the noun, (V)-A-N, and verbs non-adjacent to the noun, V-(A)-N. Our results replicated the basic adjacent effect, and produced evidence of facilitation for non-adjacent collocations. Additionally, we find preliminary evidence for a syntactic primacy effect, whereby collocational links involving the verb prove more impactful than adjective-noun collocations, despite non-adjacency. Importantly, the results reveal cumulative facilitation in "nested collocations", with a boost resulting from the simultaneous effects observed in adjacent and non-adjacent collocations. Altogether, the results extend our understanding of collocational priming effects beyond single collocations.