Constructional Processing in a Second Language: The Role of Constructional Knowledge in Verb‐Construction Integration

Abstract

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form–meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse information from a verb and a construction during real‐time sentence processing. Based on their performance in an English sentence sorting task, we divided Korean‐speaking learners of English into construction‐centered and verb‐centered groups depending on their degree of reliance on constructional information in sorting. These groups were then administered a self‐paced reading task where learners read English constructions in a word‐by‐word fashion. Results showed that learners’ reading time was contingent upon constructional sensitivity such that the construction‐centered group was faster than the verb‐centered group at integrating argument roles between a verb and a construction. These findings provide new evidence that constructional information can facilitate second language sentence processing.

Effects of verb–construction association on second language constructional generalizations in production and comprehension

“…Yet despite the role of the verb-construction association on L2 constructional generalizations, previous research has hardly considered the variability of individual constructions in terms of their frequency and complexity (e.g. Ellis and Ferreira-Junior, 2009;Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2009;Kim and Rah, 2019;Kim et al, 2020;Kyle and Crossley, 2017). Although these studies have shown a general pattern that a low degree of association between a verb and a construction constitutes a challenge for L2 learners, the effect of verb-construction association often remained entangled with the confounding effects of constructional frequency and complexity, making it difficult to tease apart the separable contributions of each factor.…”

Evaluating the Russian Language Proficiency of Bilingual and Second Language Learners of Russian

“…In laying out our approach to test design, we closely followed the steps and recommendations outlined in Brown's original scholarship (Brown 1980(Brown , 1988(Brown , 2000(Brown , 2002(Brown , 2003(Brown , 2009(Brown , 2013). Brown's established guidelines for constructing language proficiency tests and scoring test data, as well as methods of evaluating the validity and reliability of the testing tools, are widely used in the assessment literature (Kim and Rah 2019;Kleijn 2018;Trace 2020). Adhering to Brown's guidelines has yielded successful validation of cloze deletion tests constructed for English (Brown 1980, see Watanabe and Koyama 2008; Brown and Grüter 2020 for test metanalyses), French (Tremblay 2011), Japanese (Yamashita 2003) and beyond.…”

Investigating the psychological reality of argument structure constructions and N1 of N2 constructions: A comparison between L1 and L2 speakers of English

“…Language learning research informed by cognitive construction grammar (Goldberg 1995) has repeatedly shown that speakers interpret a sentence's meaning using the inherent semantics of its argument structure (or its constructional meaning), rather than solely relying on the lexical semantic meaning conveyed by the main verb (Baicchi 2015;Bencini and Goldberg 2000;Gries and Wulff 2005;Kim and Rah 2019;Liang 2002;Manzanares and López 2008). One particularly effective approach for shedding light on this question is the sorting task, in which speakers are required to sort different types of sentences according to their overall meaning.…”

“…One particularly effective approach for shedding light on this question is the sorting task, in which speakers are required to sort different types of sentences according to their overall meaning. For example, Kim and Rah (2019) created sixteen sentences that crossed four lexical verbs (cut, get, take, and throw) with four argument structure types (transitive, ditransitive, caused-motion, and resultative). L2 speakers were required to sort these sixteen sentences into groups based on the overall meaning of the sentence.…”

“…To facilitate comparison between participants' categorizations of argument structure and N1 of N2 constructions, we used Kim and Rah's (2019) sentence sorting task of argument structure constructions. In terms of the N1 of N2 constructions, we identified four types following (i) Hunston's (2022;also Hunston and Su 2020) definition of a construction as the pairing of a corpus-derived grammar pattern with a specific meaning and (ii) corpus-based analyses verifying that the N1 of N2 grammar pattern expresses specific constructional meanings, in line with cognitive construction grammar.…”