Factors influencing L2 learners’ use of the English dative construction: Insights from a learner corpus

This study examines when and how second language (L2) learners begin to exhibit sensitivity to key factors influencing the choice between the English double object and prepositional object constructions. While previous research has shown that such choices in native speakers are influenced by such factors as animacy, pronominality and verb bias, little is known about the developmental timing of these effects in L2 production. Using 5,785 dative constructions from a large-scale learner corpus, we analyzed how these variables interact with learners’ proficiency levels across 23 verbs. We found that learners showed systematic sensitivity to all of these factors, including statistical verb bias derived from a native speaker corpus (Corpus of Contemporary American English), at much earlier stages than previously suggested. These results suggest that learners may possess a cognitive bias that maps preexisting conceptual structures onto linguistic constructions, reflecting more than mere statistical learning.