ABSTRACT This study employed eye‐tracking methodology to examine how congruency and contextual predictability influence the processing of English collocations among Chinese EFL learners in natural reading contexts. Participants read sentences containing congruent or incongruent adjective–noun collocations embedded in either predictive or neutral contexts. Results revealed that incongruent collocations elicited longer reading time and higher regression probabilities across early and late processing stages, indicating sustained processing difficulty. Contextual predictability generally facilitated collocation processing, shortening fixation durations and reducing regression path times. Crucially, a significant Congruency × Context interaction emerged in regression‐out probability: predictive contexts sharply reduced regressions for incongruent collocations but had minimal impact on congruent ones. This suggests that contextual support operates selectively at a late decision‐making stage, specifically aiding the integration of incongruent items. These findings underscore the persistent role of L1 transfer in L2 collocation processing, extend the explanatory scope of the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model to collocation reading, and highlight the conditional moderating role of context in resolving cross‐linguistic conflict.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.