Integration of Verbal and Constructional Information in the Second Language Processing of English Dative Constructions

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of construction types on Korean-L1 English-L2 learners’ verb–construction integration in online processing by presenting the ditransitive and prepositional dative constructions and manipulating the verb’s association strength within these constructions. Results of a self-paced reading experiment showed that the L2 group spent longer times in the verb–construction integration in the postverbal complement region when processing the ditransitive construction, which is less canonical and highly avoided in the learners’ L1, than when processing the prepositional dative construction, which is more canonical and shares similar structural features with the L1 counterpart. In the following spillover region, L2 learners showed faster reading times as proficiency increased when the verb was strongly associated with the prepositional dative construction. Our findings expand the scope of current models on L2 sentence processing by suggesting that construction types and L2 proficiency may affect the L2 integration of verbal and constructional information.

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

“…Moreover, unlike the English resultative construction, which requires expressing a resultative phrase using an object-modifying adjective phrase (e.g. The boy made the girl happy), the Korean resultative phrase is marked by an adjunct phrase with multiple functional markers and can be semantically associated with either the subject or object (Kim et al, 2020;Shim and Den Dikken, 2007).…”

“…Scholars have also observed the effects of constructional frequency and complexity for L2 acquisition, noting that the sequence and rates of learning individual constructions vary depending on their input frequency and syntactic/semantic complexity (e.g. Ellis and Ferreira-Junior, 2009;Kim et al, 2020;Sung and Kim, 2020;Year and Gordon, 2009).…”

“…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.…”

Transitivity of Try and V Construction in British and American English

“…The semantic roles used in this research are based on those proposed by Kroeger (2004, p. 9). For this purpose, only the verbs give and bring were used because they have appeared as the frequent example for ditransitive verbs in many previous studies (Gerwin, 2013;Huelva Unternbäumen, 2015;Kim & Rah, 2021;Kim, Shin, & Hwang, 2020;Nisbet, 2020). The fact that both verbs are ditransitive verbs and try is a transitive verb can allow matching the number of arguments accurately.…”

Automatic analysis of passive constructions in Korean

“…An argument structure construction is defined as a clause-level form-function pairing which provides a means for delivering a basic proposition in language (e.g., Goldberg, 1995Goldberg, , 2006. Previous research has revealed L2 learners' increasing ability to employ complex constructions such as causatives and resultatives, along with less typical associations between constructions and verbs, in proportion to learner proficiency (e.g., Ellis & Ferreira-Junior, 2009;Kim & Rah, 2016;Kim, Shin, & Hwang, 2020;Kyle & Crossley, 2017;Sung & Kim, 2020). Crucially, however, the majority of this line of research has been skewed towards frames with concrete lexical items such as verb and preposition as a pivot (e.g., Ellis & Ferreira-Junior, 2009;Kyle, 2016;Kyle & Crossley, 2017;Römer, Roberson, O'Donnell, & Ellis, 2014).…”