A corpus study of Spanish as a Foreign Language learners’ collocation production
Orsolya Vincze, Marcos García Salido, Ana Orol, Margarita Alonso Ramos · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2016
We carried out a learner corpus study with the aim of exploring Spanish as a Foreign Language learners’ collocation production. The study involved the manual annotation of collocations in a portion of the CEDEL2 corpus using a typology specific to learner collocation errors. The quantitative comparison of learners’ and native Spanish speakers’ collocation production showed that although the two groups use a similar number of collocations, learners have a smaller repertoire and they overuse frequent combinations with less variability regarding the choice of the collocate. An analysis of learner errors revealed that most lexical collocation errors affect the collocate, the element whose selection is restricted, and that most errors result from L1 transfer.