Publications

Publication details [#68145]

Shin, Gyu-Ho and Hyunwoo Kim. 2021. Roles of verb and construction cues: Cross-language comparisons between English and Korean sentence comprehension. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 19 (2) : 333–364. https://benjamins.com/catalog/rcl.00087.shi
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Journal DOI
10.1075/rcl

Annotation

This study investigates how speakers of English and Korean, two typologically distinct languages, derive information from a verb and a construction to achieve sentence comprehension. In a sentence-sorting task, the authors manipulated verb semantics (real versus nonce) in each language. The results showed that participants from both languages were less inclined to sort sentences by a verb cue when the lexical-semantic information about a verb was obscured (i.e., nonce verb). In addition, the Korean-speaking participants were less likely affected by the verb semantics conditions than the English-speaking participants. These findings suggest the role of an argument structure construction in sentence comprehension as a co-contributor of sentence meaning, supporting the constructional approach. The findings also imply language-specific mechanisms of sentence comprehension, contingent upon the varied impact of a verb on sentence meaning in English and Korean.