Regular articles
Constructions at work in foreign language learners’ mind
A comparison between two sentence-sorting experiments with English and Italian learners
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 and Goldberg (2000) 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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► pp. 903 ff.
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