English learners’ knowledge of prepositions: Collocational knowledge or knowledge based on meaning?

Second language (L2) learners’ successful performance in an L2 can be partly attributed to their knowledge of collocations. In some cases, this knowledge is accompanied by knowledge of the semantic and/or grammatical patterns that motivate the collocation. At other times, collocational knowledge may serve a compensatory role. To determine the extent to which second language learners’ interlanguage relies on collocational knowledge in lieu of precise semantic knowledge, an experiment examined the performance of advanced adult English learners (N = 90) from Chinese, Korean, and Spanish L1 backgrounds on a fill-in-the-blanks test in which matched items targeted the same specific sense of a preposition but varied in word co-occurrence frequency, as determined through a corpus analysis. An ANOVA indicated that collocational frequencies of the phrase in which the preposition was embedded had a significant effect (p < .001) on the performance of the learners. The study suggests that even fairly advanced NNSs use collocational knowledge when acquiring prepositions’ noncentral senses.