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Bilingual processing of verbal and constructional information in English dative constructions: effects of cross-linguistic influence

  • Hyunwoo Kim EMAIL logo , Yunchuan Chen and Xueyan Liu
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in L2 learners’ integration of a verb and a construction during online English sentence processing. In a self-paced reading task, L1-English speakers and Chinese-L1 learners of English read the English double-object and prepositional dative constructions with verbs whose Chinese translation equivalents are either compatible or incompatible with each dative form. When including only a subset of trials for which participants provided expected translations for the target sentences (i.e., translating the English prepositional dative construction into a Chinese prepositional dative sentence and translating the English double-object construction into a Chinese double-object sentence), the effect of cross-linguistic influence emerged only in a certain type of verbs. When including all trials in the analysis, we found the effect of cross-linguistic influence for all verb types. These results provide some evidence that the cross-linguistic activation of verbs can influence verb-construction integration in L2 processing. The study highlights how bilingual co-activation of verbs extends beyond the lexical and structural levels to influence the integration of multiple sources of information.


Corresponding author: Hyunwoo Kim, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, E-mail:

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Received: 2021-11-29
Accepted: 2022-07-16
Published Online: 2022-08-12
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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