This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners’ use of constructional information in a sentence‐sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence‐sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English sentences according to argument structure constructions rather than lexical verbs. However, these studies collapsed both heavy (e.g., cut, throw) and light (e.g., get, take) verbs into a single variable, blurring the effects of the semantic heaviness of the verbs. The present study designed a sentence‐sorting task involving heavy and light verbs as separate variables and administered it with advanced and intermediate adult learners of English (Experiment 1). Results showed that while advanced learners showed construction‐dominant sortings regardless of the heaviness of a verb, intermediate learners produced construction‐based sortings only in the light verb condition. A corpus analysis of learner essays (Experiment 2) revealed that intermediate learners relied on light verbs in producing constructions more strongly than advanced learners and native speakers. These findings suggest that L2 proficiency modulates the degree to which the semantic heaviness of a verb affects learners’ use of constructional knowledge in sorting and producing English sentences.

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form–meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse information from a verb and a construction during real‐time sentence processing. Based on their performance in an English sentence sorting task, we divided Korean‐speaking learners of English into construction‐centered and verb‐centered groups depending on their degree of reliance on constructional information in sorting. These groups were then administered a self‐paced reading task where learners read English constructions in a word‐by‐word fashion. Results showed that learners’ reading time was contingent upon constructional sensitivity such that the construction‐centered group was faster than the verb‐centered group at integrating argument roles between a verb and a construction. These findings provide new evidence that constructional information can facilitate second language sentence processing.

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The present study investigated the effects of construction‐based instruction on Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ production of the English argument structure constructions. Within the theoretical framework of construction grammar (Goldberg, 1995), the authors presented college students with English constructions in a hierarchical network and provided contextually meaningful visual scenes in connection with the language input. Results from translation and guided writing tasks, which were implemented before, immediately after, and 4 weeks after the learning sessions, revealed that learners who received construction‐based instruction outperformed those who received form‐centered instruction in both immediate and delayed posttests. Further, among the construction‐based groups, only those learners who were presented with the target constructions in a network hierarchy maintained improved performance in the delayed posttest. The authors conclude by addressing the pedagogical implications for construction‐based teaching in the EFL context.

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