Content area
This study closely replicates the analyses of the third research question in Römer and Berger (2019), which reported that the associations between verbs and verb argument constructions (VACs) used by German and Spanish learners of English move closer to a native usage norm as the learners’ proficiency increases. This study conducted the same correlation analyses from the original study but with a substantially expanded version of the learner corpus used therein. Additionally, we conducted zero-inflated negative binomial analyses to estimate the relationship between the frequencies of verb-VAC combinations in the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the learner subcorpora representing different proficiency levels. Our findings were consistent with the original study in showing significant positive correlations between frequencies of the verb-VAC combinations in the BNC and in the learner subcorpora but further revealed the potential effect of topic on the learners’ VAC usage. Implications for future studies are discussed.
Details
Inferences;
Language Acquisition;
English (Second Language);
Syntax;
Correlation;
Replication (Evaluation);
Second Language Learning;
Verbs;
Statistical Analysis;
Statistical Inference;
Statistical Data;
Data Processing;
Database Management Systems;
Regression (Statistics);
English Learners
; Lu, Xiaofei 2
1 Department of English, College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong, China
2 Department of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA