Second Language Production and Processing of Phrasal Verb Constructions: A Priming Study

摘要

Acquisition of phrasal verbs (e.g. take off, open up) is particularly problematic for learners of English, especially those phrasal verbs that allow for alternations in structural form. Phrasal verbs consist of a verb-particle combination. Often non-native speakers of English default to one-word alternatives to phrasal verbs, which may indicate difficulty in accessing these multi-word constructions (Liao & Fukuya, 2004). Although a number of corpus-based studies on phrasal verb construction use exist, few psycholinguistic methods have been applied to assess processing of these constructions, especially in the L2 literature. As such, we used a sentence elicitation task followed by a structural priming paradigm to address this gap. We investigated the effects of prime surprisal effects for syntactic constructions involving directional phrasal verbs, or those phrasal verbs that indicate the movement of an object in some direction (e.g. Pull the screen down). In English, directional phrasal verbs can take a continuous construction, wherein the particle immediately follows the verb (I took out the trash) or a discontinuous construction, where the verb and particle are separated by the direct object (I took the trash out). Surprisal effects have been reported in the literature for native speakers and occur when a prime verb presented in a syntactic construction it least biased towards results in target productions using that same construction (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010; Jaeger and Snider, 2013).;All three language groups used the continuous construction overwhelmingly more than the discontinuous in the sentence elicitation phase. However, none of the groups showed priming effects when collapsed over verbs. As for surprisal, the Spanish learner group revealed surprisal effects for both constructions. Native speakers and Chinese learners showed no significant effect of surprisal.;These findings have implications for implicit learning accounts and the interlanguage that learners build while they are acquiring a second language. Even more specifically, these results suggest that first language transfer may affect the manner in which learners acquire particular linguistic features in the L2 and present evidence for error-based learning (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006). These are essential issues to consider in the process of understanding how to eventually construct classroom lessons in a foreign and second language environment.