Roles of verb and construction cues Cross-language comparisons between English and Korean sentence comprehension

This study investigates how speakers of English and Korean, two typologi-cally distinct languages, derive information from a verb and a construction to achieve sentence comprehension. In a sentence-sorting task, we manipu-lated verb semantics (real versus nonce) in each language. The results showed that participants from both languages were less inclined to sort sen-tences by a verb cue when the lexical-semantic information about a verb was obscured (i.e., nonce verb). In addition, the Korean-speaking partici-pants were less likely affected by the verb semantics conditions than the English-speaking participants. These findings suggest the role of an argu-ment structure construction in sentence comprehension as a co-contributor of sentence meaning, supporting the constructionist approach. The findings also imply language-specific mechanisms of sentence comprehension, con-tingent upon the varied impact of a verb on sentence meaning in English and Korean.