Studies in Second Language Acquisition | 2019
OBSERVING THE EMERGENCE OF CONSTRUCTIONAL KNOWLEDGE: VERB PATTERNS IN GERMAN AND SPANISH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AT DIFFERENT PROFICIENCY LEVELS
Abstract
Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Romer, & O’Donnell, 2016 ; Tyler & Ortega, 2018 ) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., “V with n,” illustrated by he always agrees with her ) develops. We extracted VACs from subsets of the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database, altogether comprising more than 68,000 texts and 6 million words. For each VAC, L1 learner group, and proficiency level, we determined type and token frequencies, as well as the most dominant verb-VAC associations. To study effects of proficiency and L1 on VAC production, we carried out correlation analyses to compare verb-VAC associations of learners at different levels and different L1 backgrounds. We also correlated each learner dataset with comparable data from a large reference corpus of native English usage. Results indicate that with increasing proficiency, learners expand their VAC repertoire and productivity, and verb-VAC associations move closer to native usage.