School of Humanities

This article describes the data analysis according to the reflective lifeworld approach, which represents an empirical application of phenomenological philosophy. The analysis within this approach is based upon the ‘hermeneutic rule’ of Gadamer, characterized by a dynamic movement between the whole, the parts, and the whole. The final outcome is a rich description of the essence – the invariant structure and contextual structure of the phenomenon and its constituents – the components of the essential structure. The process of data analysis is illustrated by empirical examples.

An increasing number of studies provide evidence for the importance of multi-word units (such as a cup of tea, play hide and seek, brush your teeth) in language acquisition and language processing. The extent to which these word combinations are entrenched as a unit appears to be a gradient phenomenon; the more frequently a word string is used, the more it seems to be entrenched.
While studies on degrees of entrenchment of multi-word units have yielded valuable insights, several important issues have not been addressed. First, if usage frequency determines degree of entrenchment, you would expect differences between language users, as they differ in their linguistic experiences. It is not known, though, how large these differences are.
In addition to determining the degree of variation across speakers, it needs to be investigated which factors underlie such differences. While usage frequency is of great significance, it is improbable that it is the only factor determining degree of entrenchment. A more varied set of aspects influencing an item’s salience is likely to play a role.
Furthermore, research into entrenchment predominantly makes use of online experiments. This study set out to examine the usefulness of offline research methods in the investigation of entrenchment and individual variation. A judgement task, more specifically a Magnitude Estimation task, was used. In this task, participants judged the degree to which the words in a given word combination belong together; the degree of bondedness. This judgement task was followed by focus group discussions.
Analyses reveal interesting discrepancies between bondedness judgements and frequency. While both the judgements and the frequencies constitute a continuum, there is no straightforward correspondence between the two types of scores. Furthermore, participants were found to differ substantially in perceived degree of bondedness of the same multi-word combination. Focus group discussions reveal that the differences between participants are related to three types of variation: variation in task strategy, variation in usage, and circumstances leading to random variation. Various procedures are proposed to reduce, and control for, the first and third type of variation.
The group discussions also yield insight into the factors that are taken into account in the assessment of bondedness. Perceived degree of bondedness is based on an intricate interplay of features, involving absolute and relative frequency, as well as other aspects influencing an item’s prototypicality and familiarity of form and meaning.
This thesis discusses how the bondedness judgements relate to other ways of examining entrenchment. A comparison is made between different forms of language processing (i.e. production, reception and evaluation) and between different research methods (i.e. offline and online tasks and corpus research). As is shown, there are interesting links between the concept of bondedness and various corpus-based measures of attraction that are more sophisticated than simple frequency of co-occurrence. The differences between the quantitative and qualitative offline data collected in this study on the one hand, and, on the other, the online data obtained in previous research, point to different opportunities and limitations of the research methods.
In sum, the results of this study underline the importance of paying attention to, first, individual variation, and second, the intricate ways in which frequency and other factors contribute to a word string’s entrenchment, thus influencing its representational status and its role in different types of tasks. It is argued that in order to fully understand how our linguistic experiences shape our linguistic representations, and how we put them to use in various tasks, a combination of different methods is to be used.

In a usage-based framework, variation is part and parcel of our linguistic experiences, and therefore also of our mental representations of language. In this article, we bring attention to variation as a source of information. Instead of discarding variation as mere noise, we examine what it can reveal about the representation and use of linguistic knowledge. By means of metalinguistic judgment data, we demonstrate how to quantify and interpret four types of variation: variation across items, participants, time, and methods. The data concern familiarity ratings assigned by 91 native speakers of Dutch to 79 Dutch prepositional phrases such as in de tuin ‘in the garden’ and rond de ingang ‘around the entrance’. Participants performed the judgment task twice within a period of one to two weeks, using either a 7-point Likert scale or a Magnitude Estimation scale. We explicate the principles according to which the different types of variation can be considered information about mental re...

abstractWhile theories on predictive processing posit that predictions are based on one’s prior experiences, experimental work has effectively ignored the fact that people differ from each other in their linguistic experiences and, consequently, in the predictions they generate. We examine usage-based variation by means of three groups of participants (recruiters, job-seekers, and people not (yet) looking for a job), two stimuli sets (word sequences characteristic of either job ads or news reports), and two experiments (a Completion task and a Voice Onset Time task). We show that differences in experiences with a particular register result in different expectations regarding word sequences characteristic of that register, thus pointing to differences in mental representations of language. Subsequently, we investigate to what extent different operationalizations of word predictability are accurate predictors of voice onset times. A measure of a participant’s own expectations proves t...