Yi Wei, School of Chinese as a Foreign Language Education, published an article in Language Learning to reveal the statistical intuition of native speakers and second speakers

On October 18, 2022, Yi Wei, assistant professor at the School of Chinese as a Foreign Language Education of Peking University, published a title entitled "Statistical Intuition of Native Speakers and Second Speakers on the Frequency and Link Strength of Speech Blocks" online in Language Learning, a top international journal in linguistics "Investigating first and second language speaker intuitions of phrasal frequency and association strength of multiword sequences"), which analyzes and compares the statistical intuition of language blocks and their linguistic motivations
of native and dilingual speakers.

Screenshot of the paper

Human beings can make intuitive judgments
about the frequency and probability of various events in daily life.
Usage-based theories believe that language input and language use are not chaotic and there are certain statistical laws
.
Many previous studies have shown that native speakers and second speakers have a more accurate statistical intuition
about how often words are used.
In contrast, the academic community has very limited understanding of the following questions: First, can native speakers and second linguists accurately judge the statistical laws of phrase-level language? Second, what linguistic factors drive the statistical intuition of native speakers and linguists about language blocks? Around the above two questions, Yiwei and his collaborators recruited native speakers and second language participants, asked them to make intuitive judgments about the frequency and association strength of "adjective-noun" collocations, and analyzed the data
using a Bayesian mixed-effect model.
It was found that both native speakers and second linguists showed a state of convergence in terms of language blocks, and neither of them was accurate
enough.
In addition, both groups of people used multilingualism at both word level and phrase level when judging the frequency and link strength of speech blocks
.

Illustration in the text

The first and corresponding author of the study work is Yi Wei, the second author is Kaiwen Man, assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of Alabama, and the third author is Ryo Maie
, a doctoral student in the Department of Second Language Acquisition at Michigan State University.
Language Learning is a top international journal in linguistics, with a comprehensive impact factor of 5.
24, and Google Scholar shows that it ranks third
in all language journals.
The study is also the first article published by teachers of the Institute of Chinese as a Foreign Language Education in Language Learning, which is groundbreaking
.