What can L1 speakers tell us about killing hope? A novel behavioral measure for identifying collocations

Collocations, semi-productive lexical combinations with onefigurative and one literal word, are said to be a “pain in theneck” for researchers and L2 learners. The present study aims:(i) to conceptually replicate the processing costs incurred byL1 speakers when processing collocations using a larger andmore diverse set of items, (ii) to use literalness judgementsto test whether L1 speakers are aware of the semi-transparentmeaning of a collocation, and (iii) to test whether the pres-ence of processing costs associated with collocations can bepredicted from literalness judgements. If so, we propose thatliteralness judgements could be used as a diagnostic for reli-ably identifying collocations. We replicate the L1 processingcosts with a larger stimulus set and demonstrate that speakersare aware of the semi-transparent meaning of the collocation.We further show that L1 speaker judgements about the literal-ness of a word combination can be used to predict its status asa collocation.