L2 Proficiency Effects on the Use of Verb Bias Information

Abstract

This study investigated whether L2 proficiency affected how L2 learners used verb bias information in their written production. Two groups of high proficiency and low proficiency L2 learners participated in a sentence completion task with direct object (DO) bias verbs, equi (EQ) bias verbs and sentential complement (SC) bias verbs. The results showed a significant difference between the two L2 learner groups in the percentage of DO and SC sentence completions preferred for each verb type. The low proficiency group used more DO structures and fewer SC structures for all three types of verbs compared to the high proficiency group. However, despite the low proficiency group’s preference for the DO sentence structure, significant correlations between the verb bias strength index of each verb and number of DO/SC sentence completions were found for both the low and high proficiency groups. These results suggest that while low proficiency L2 learners generally prefer to use the structurally more minimal DO structure as opposed to the SC structure, they are sensitive to verb bias properties and are able to use this information in their written production.