Abstract
This chapter tackles the issue of constructional priming and shows how L1 and L2 speakers achieve sentence interpretation. The pioneering psycholinguistic experiment conducted by Healy and Miller showed that native speakers of English relied on the matrix verb to determine sentence meaning. However, Bencini and Goldberg undermined such a claim: they used an improved version of the sentence-sorting protocol designed by Healy and Miller and demonstrated that native speakers rely on argument structure constructions as language categories to process and interpret sentence meaning. With a view to ascertaining whether Italian university learners of English were influenced by the matrix verb or by syntactic configurations in their interpretation of sentences, Bencini and Goldberg’s experiment has been replicated with bilingual subjects: the results offer insightful cross-linguistic observations following from two typologically unrelated languages.
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Baicchi, A. (2015). Sentence-Sorting Experiment. In: Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18269-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18269-8_6
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