Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System: Psycholinguistic Evidence from L2 Learners of English (SpringerBriefs in Education)

"This book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the 'Common European Framework of Reference for Languages' (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning."--Publisher's description This book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the ĺlCommon European Framework of Reference for Languagesĺl (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning Front Matter....Pages i-ix Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Introduction: Theoretical Prerequisites....Pages 3-8 Complex Adaptive Systems: The Case of Language....Pages 9-31 The Complex Dynamics of Meaning Construction....Pages 33-47 Construction Grammar(s)....Pages 49-75 Front Matter....Pages 77-77 Introduction: Priming....Pages 79-86 Sentence-Sorting Experiment....Pages 87-97 Sentence-Elicitation Experiment....Pages 99-110 Sentence-Completion Experiment....Pages 111-119 Concluding Remarks....Pages 121-131