The role of exposure condition, awareness and item type in developing implicit and explicit knowledge of collocational rules

This study expands on previous SLA research by focusing on learning collocational rules. The study also explores the interaction between exposure conditions, awareness, and item-related variables in the context of collocation learning. Chinese learners of English were exposed to sentences from large corpora, featuring four target node verbs (replaced with pseudowords) and their respective noun collocates. There are two pairs of novel verbs with different L1-L2 congruencies in the experimental material. Participants were divided into incidental and intentional groups. The learning effectiveness was assessed through a plausibility judgment test (PJT), which included trained, new, and swapped items. Awareness of the underlying rules was measured using source attributions, retrospective verbal reports, and posttest thinking aloud. The results revealed that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge of collocational rules. Rule-searching led to greater explicit knowledge but did not improve overall learning outcomes. Additionally, an interaction was observed among awareness, rule type, and test type. As the difficulty level increased in terms of L1-L2 congruency or item type, the importance of awareness in meeting the learning demands also increased.