Are lexical bundles stored and processed as single units

This paper explores the tenability of the hypothesis that lexical bundles (i.e., frequentl y recurring strings of words that often span traditional syntactic boundaries) are stored and processed holistically. Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis, where sentences containing 4and 5-word lexical bundles and their controls, which did not contain lexical bundles, were presented to participants in a word-by-word, chunk-by-chunk, and sentence-by-sentence fashion. The stimuli were controlled for token and bundle frequency, transitional probabilities and morphological and phonological complexity. In the word-by-word experiment, lexical bundle sequences were not read significantly faster than non-lexical bundle strings, thus suggesting that word-by-word presentation disrupts the facilitatory effect of bundles. However, lexical bundles and sentences containing lexical bundles were read significantly faster than their controls in the other two self-paced reading experiments as predicted by the theory.