ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of factors that have been shown by research to influence the likelihood and rate of second language learners’ acquisition of multiword items (collocations, idioms, phrasal verbs, etc.). One type of such factors relates to how often and in what circumstances multiword items are encountered, including ways in which pedagogic interventions direct learners’ attention to such items and stimulate cognitive engagement with them. Other factors pertain to the properties of the multiword items themselves, such as whether they are experienced by the learner as transparent or as opaque, whether they evoke mental imagery, whether they are made up of familiar constituents or include new words, and whether they exhibit certain structural properties (e.g., alliteration and rhyme) which can render them comparatively memorable. While recognizing that substantial progress has been made in this area over the past couple of decades, the chapter closes with an agenda for further research.
