Exploring the Relationship between Stay-abroad Experiences, Frequency Effects, and Context Use in L2 Idiom Comprehension

This article explores to what extent a stay-abroad experience of L2 learners leads to more productive use of contextual clues and better benefits from frequency effects in L2 idiom comprehension. To this end, seventy-two learners of German (L1 French) were presented with a test on idiom comprehension that contained items both with and without a context and differing degrees of frequency. Furthermore, the participants completed a questionnaire on their stay-abroad experience (length of stay, country, etc.) as well as providing other data from their linguistic biography (language proficiency level, other languages, etc.). The results show that participants with a stay-abroad experience neither outperformed those without such an experience nor benefited from frequency effects and the presence of context. However, frequency was found to positively affect performance for items presented in context.