Author(s)

Ru Ren ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, Central South University, Changsha, 410000, China

Corresponding Author

Ru Ren

ABSTRACT

This study explores the effects of two processing paths contextual guessing and motivational processing on the acquisition of verb-noun collocation knowledge of three semantic types: semantically consistent, semantically related, and semantically unrelated collocations. The main findings are as follows: (1) The main effect of processing paths is significant; collocation acquisition through the contextual guessing path is superior to that through the motivational processing path, and performance in the immediate test is better than that in Delayed Test A and Delayed Test B. (2) Under the contextual guessing path, semantically unrelated collocations show the most prominent acquisition advantage and the best memory retention. Under the motivational processing path, semantically consistent collocations perform slightly better than semantically unrelated collocations in both acquisition and memory retention. (3) Under different processing paths, semantically consistent and semantically unrelated collocations each have their advantages, and semantically unrelated collocations are consistently better acquired than semantically related collocations.

KEYWORDS

Processing Path; Semantic Consistency; Semantic Unrelatedness; Semantic Relatedness; Lexical Collocation

CITE THIS PAPER

Ru Ren. The Effects of Processing Paths on the Acquisition of Collocation Knowledge of Different Semantic Types by English Beginners. Curriculum and Teaching Methodology (2026). Vol. 9, No.2, 153-161. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/curtm.2026.090219.

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