Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Drawing on the principles of associative learning theory and positing a statistical foundation for language acquisition, this paper investigates the independent contributions of the predictive validities of verbal and constructional cues in English native and non-native speakers' mental representations of the English as-predicative construction. This is examined through two experiments: a sentence completion task targeting constructional outcome retrieval (Experiment 1), and a gap-fill schema task with a focus on verb retrieval (Experiment 2). The results demonstrate that both cues are integrated in parallel when eliciting a constructional outcome (Experiment 1), but only construction cue validity plays a role in eliciting verbal outcomes (Experiment 2). Verb frequency and voice additionally contribute to the retrieval of verbal and constructional information in distinct manners. The present study raises discussions about distributional cue integration in forward versus backward retrieval of linguistic information, in addition to emphasizing the importance of considering cross-linguistic factors in future research.