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Abstract This study examines how L1-L2 congruency affects the processing of Chinese collocations by English-speaking learners in the United States. Seventy-nine participants completed an online acceptability judgment task involving congruent (L1 and L2 structurally and semantically aligned) and incongruent collocations. Results showed that learners of Chinese judged congruent items more accurately than incongruent ones, particularly at lower proficiency levels. However, no clear congruency effect was observed in response times. Meanwhile, collocational frequency significantly predicted both accuracy and speed, with stronger effects among higher-proficiency learners. In contrast, native speakers performed near the ceiling, showing no sensitivity to congruency. L2 proficiency modulated the congruency effect in accuracy: lower-proficiency learners demonstrated greater sensitivity to congruency, while higher-proficiency learners processed both types more uniformly. These findings suggest that congruent collocations benefit from L1-based processing, especially for lower-proficiency learners, and that frequency plays a crucial role in facilitating collocational processing. The study has implications not only for Chinese instruction in English-speaking contexts but also for understanding formulaic language processing in logographic languages.
Lu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.