Entrenchment from a psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspective.

Abstract

Across the various entrenchment definitions given in the cognitive linguistics literature, it is possible to identify the following recurring key ingredients: high frequency of use, great ease of processing, great strength of representation, high fluency of composition, and chunk status. Although the term entrenchment itself has little currency outside of usage-based cognitive linguistics, several strands of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic research have investigated frequency effects on language processing and can therefore contribute to sharpening the cognitive linguistics notion of entrenchment. The present chapter aims to review this research, to discuss how it can be integrated into an empirically informed and coherent picture of linguistic entrenchment, and to outline some promising avenues for further research. Section 6.2 provides an overview of how the notion of entrenchment has been defined in the cognitive linguistics literature, with a special focus on assumptions that are relevant to operationalizing entrenchment for experimental purposes. Section 6.3 presents experimental studies attesting to the fact that high-frequency expressions are processed with greater speed and accuracy than matched low-frequency expressions, probably as a result of enhanced fluency of composition. Section 6.4 reviews psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research testing the relationship between chunk status and usage frequency. Section 6.5 highlights outstanding questions and sketches some possible directions in which future research might fruitfully proceed. Section 6.6 concludes the chapter.Note that this review focuses on the entrenchment of transparent multimorphemic sequences, thus deliberately excluding relevant research on noncompositional sequences (e.g., all of a sudden, kick the bucket, by and large, see Croft, 2001, p. 15) and monomorphemic words (an overview of relevant research and further references can be found in Blumenthal-Dramé, 2012, and Schmidʼs introduction to this volume). This should clearly not be taken to imply that the notion of entrenchment is irrelevant or even inapplicable to nontransparent sequences or single words. However, by virtue of their being arbitrary form-meaning associations, such strings inherently have to be represented in a holistic fashion at some level, no matter how frequent. The maximally strong prediction that frequency on its own can induce chunk status-which, as will become clear later, must be seen as the theoretically most relevant entrenchment criterion-can only be tested on the basis of strings for which there is no logical

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“…Ferretti et al, 2018). This means that usage-based and emergentist researchers investigating factors such as the biological properties of the language-ready brain (e.g., Arbib, 2012, 2015), the neurological foundations of entrenchment (Schmid, 2015; Blumenthal-Dramé, 2016), the neurological foundations of semantic simulation (Bergen, 2012), or the neurological foundations of constructions (Pulvermüller et al, 2013; Goldberg, 2019), are doing biolinguistics as well. In this paper, however, our interest in convergences and divergences is somewhat more specific.…”

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

“…Rather than putting together that’s and right or that’s and fine compositionally by means of syntactic operations, speakers who routinely use these patterns probably have them available as ready-made chunks or prefabs in their mental lexicons ( Gobet et al, 2001 ; Ellis 2017 ). However, it is unclear how many repetitions are required to create such a chunk in the mental lexicon, and also, from a methodological point of view, how many attestations would be required as evidence for the existence of such a chunk ( Blumenthal-Dramé 2012 ; Blumenthal-Dramé 2017 ). Therefore, following the arguments put forward by Schmid (2020) , we argue that the chunk-like processing and representation of sequences is best accounted for in terms of particularly strong syntagmatic associations giving rise to a very high sequential predictability.…”

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