Japanese-English Bilinguals’ Construal of Novel Verbs

Haruka Konishi, Frances Wilson and Roberta Golinkoff

Languages vary in the way they encode properties of events. For example, some languages (e.g., English) typically encode manner of motion (e.g., running) in the verb, while other languages (e.g., Greek) typically encode the path of motion in the verb (e.g. enter) (Talmy, 1985). Previous research on early and late bilinguals has suggested that although bilinguals do show evidence of using language-specific encoding strategies, they also seem to show cross-linguistic influences. That is, the first language (L1) affects the second language (L2) and vice versa. However, there has been little attempt to directly compare cross-linguistic influences in late (post-puberty) bilinguals (Jarvis, 2010). We present a study investigating verb construal in Japanese-English late bilinguals.

Maguire et al. (2010) found that although Japanese is typically considered to be a path language, in a verb construal task, monolingual Japanese adults exhibited a strong manner bias when asked to decide the meaning of novel verbs.

Following the method used by Maguire et al., 20 advanced late bilinguals (9 L1 English, L2 Japanese; 11 L1 Japanese, L2 English) in two sessions (one presented in English; one in Japanese, in counterbalanced order), saw an animated starfish performing actions in relation to a ground object (a ball). The linguistic stimuli were presented by a bilingual speaker. There were two types of trials: familiarization and test. During familiarization, participants saw the animated starfish perform a novel action paired with a novel verb four times on a television screen. At test, participants saw the same manner with a novel path on one side of the screen, and a novel manner with the same path on the other side of the screen.

A chi-square analysis revealed that the English L1 group chose the “Same Manner” option in both languages, suggesting a possible cross-linguistic influence. In contrast to the findings of Maguire et al. with Japanese monolinguals, Japanese L1 bilinguals chose Manner for English, and overwhelmingly chose Path for Japanese χ2 (1, 20)=3.92, p=. 05 (Figure 1).

Thus, for the Japanese L1 bilinguals, L2 lexicalization patterns do not necessarily shape verb construal when they hear the stimuli in Japanese. Although prior research has found a bi-directional cross-linguistic influence on event conceptualization, such that lexicalization patterns in both the L1 and L2 move away from native speaker norms (Brown, 2010), our findings suggest that such cross-linguistic influences are not necessarily symmetrical in a verb construal task Furthermore, rather than convergence towards a mid point between the L1 and L2, Japanese L1 English L2 showed greater differences between verb construal in English and Japanese than have been found for monolingual native speakers of these two languages. These findings suggest that contrary to previous findings, (add ref?) cross-linguistic influence does not always lead to a convergence of L1 and L2 verb construal patterns.

Figure 1. The number of participants that displayed a manner bias by the type of speaker and the language of the stimuli

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English  Stimuli   Japanese  Stimuli  

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