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

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.