TY - JOUR
T1 - Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English
T2 - Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals
AU - Dussias, Paola E.
AU - Marful, Alejandra
AU - Gerfen, Chip
AU - Molina, María Teresa Bajo
N1 - Funding Information:
The writing of this article was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0821924 to P.E.D. and C.G.
PY - 2010/11
Y1 - 2010/11
N2 - Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world's population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish-English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A-C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic -journals.org/content/supplemental.
AB - Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world's population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish-English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A-C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic -journals.org/content/supplemental.
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U2 - 10.3758/BRM.42.4.1004
DO - 10.3758/BRM.42.4.1004
M3 - Article
C2 - 21139167
AN - SCOPUS:78650712614
SN - 1554-351X
VL - 42
SP - 1004
EP - 1011
JO - Behavior research methods
JF - Behavior research methods
IS - 4
ER -