Resumen de Late Japanese Bilinguals’ Novel Verb Construal

Haruka Konishi, Frances Wilson, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Mandy J. Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

• Languages differ in how they encode events. Some languages (e.g., English) encode manner of motion (e.g., hop) in verbs while others (e.g., Spanish) encode the path of motion (e.g., descender-descend) (Talmy, 1985). This study examines verb construal in Japanese bilingual adults (L1-Japanese, L2-English). Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Imai, Haryu, Vanegas, Okada, Pulverman and Sanchez-Davis (2010) suggest that although Japanese is traditionally considered a path language, manner plays an important role in Japanese verbs. Bilinguals completed two verb construal tasks (one in English; one in Japanese). Results showed that the Japanese bilinguals construed a novel verb as encoding manner for English and chose path for Japanese. This differs from Maguire et al. (2010) who found that Japanese monolinguals construed a novel verb as encoding manner. Bilinguals may find it useful to highlight differences between Japanese and English to keep the two languages distinct. Bilingual verb construal may be influenced by the linguistic typology of bilinguals’ L1 and L2.