Measuring L2 Explicit Knowledge of English Verb-Particle Constructions: Frequency and Semantic Transparency at Two Proficiency Levels

Verb-particle constructions, also known as phrasal verbs (PVs), have long been challenging for second language (L2) learners of English with its discontinuous syntactic structure and complex semantic structure. Previous literature on L2 PV acquisition focused on the central issues such as avoidance (Gonzalez 2010, 2012; Dagut and Laufer 1985; Laufer and Eliasson 1993; Liao and Fukuya 2004) and first language (L1) effects (Hulstijn and Marchena 1989). This chapter reports a study that adopts the functionalist approach to language acquisition (Ellis 2006) and aims to examine how two of the most important internal properties of PVs (frequency and semantic transparency) interact and affect the developmental patterns in L2 learners’ interlanguage system. Eighty-nine low-intermediate and advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language participated in the study. An untimed structured discourse-level cloze test was used to measure learners’ explicit knowledge of PVs. Our results indicated main effects of frequency, semantic transparency, and L2 proficiency. PVs with higher frequency were better acquired than lower-frequency PVs; literal PVs were better acquired than figurative PVs. L2 learners’ explicit knowledge of PVs accumulated with the growth of English proficiency. At the same time, frequency and transparency showed interaction effects: The acquisition of figurative PVs was more strongly influenced by the token frequency of these items compared with the acquisition of literal PVs, resulting in figurative low-frequency PVs being the most problematic category to L2 learners. This finding implies that classroom pedagogy should direct attention to the fossilized areas in order to compensate for the lack of input exposure and semantic complexity.