Investigating Collocational Priming in Turkish

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES, cilt.13, sa.2, ss.465-486, 2017 (Hakemli Dergi)

Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each

model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the

fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their

explanations. Hoey‟s lexical priming theory (2005) tries to shed light on the issue of collocational processing in

the internal lexicon from a cognitive and psycholinguistic perspective and its importance for our overall creative

language production. A number of psycholinguistic studies have tested Hoey's theory as it relates to English, but

work in other languages is limited. The present study broadens the scope of work in this area by investigating

whether collocational priming also holds for speakers of Turkish. Furthermore, the possible influence of

frequency and part of speech on collocational priming is scrutinized by exploring the correlations between

response times in the priming experiment and these independent variables. The findings revealed a significant

collocational priming effect for Turkish L1 users, in line with Hoey‟s claims. The regression analysis indicated

frequency and part of speech as important predictors of processing duration. The correlation analysis also

showed significant correlations between the response times and both word and collocational frequency. A

tentative mental lexicon framework is proposed based on the findings of this research.