Lulu Song, Rachel Pulverman, Christina Pepe, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared to English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as ascender ('to move upward') and salir ('to go out'), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., run, jog) and expresses path in prepositional phrases (e.g., out of the barn). The way in which a language encodes an event is known as its lexicalization pattern or bias. Using a written sentence elicitation task, we asked whether adult Spanish learners whose L1 was English adopted Spanish lexicalization biases, and what types of L2 exposure facilitated the learning of lexicalization biases...
2016: Language Learning and Development