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Article published In: Corpus Approaches to Language, Thought and Communication
Edited by Wei-lun Lu, Naděžda Kudrnáčová and Laura A. Janda
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:1] 2019
► pp. 219–242

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Regular articles

Constructions at work in foreign language learners’ mind

A comparison between two sentence-sorting experiments with English and Italian learners

 | University of Genoa
 | University of Turin
Published online: 20 August 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00032.bai
Abstract
This article reports empirical evidence of constructional priming effects in L2 learners of English and Italian. The well-known pioneering experiment carried out by Bencini, G., & Goldberg, A. (2000). The contribution of argument structure constructions to sentence meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 431, 640–651. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar with L1 speakers of English paved the way for our investigation. We employed the same protocol to ascertain whether constructions have an ontological status also in the mind of L2 learners. We conducted experiments with four groups of learners whose language proficiency levels correspond to the B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The results we obtained in our cross-linguistic experiments demonstrate that learners are reliant on constructional templates when they are required to produce linguistic generalizations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Priming
  • 3.Priming experiment with native speakers of American English
  • 4.Experiment with Italian university learners of English
    • 4.1L2 pioneering studies
    • 4.2Constructional priming in Italian learners of English
      • 4.2.1Materials
      • 4.2.2Procedure
      • 4.2.3Scoring
      • 4.2.4Results
    • 4.3An interim observation on language typology
  • 5.Constructional priming in Romance-language-speaking learners of Italian
    • 5.1Stimuli
    • 5.2Procedure
    • 5.3Scoring
    • 5.4Results
  • 6.Discussion of the results
  • 7.Pedagogical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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