ABSTRACT
Usage-based approaches to psycholinguistics posit that the initial stages of grammar acquisition involve the most frequent and semantically prototypical exemplars of a construction. Our study extends such inquiry to Spanish by analyzing the verbs used with the indirect object clitic le in a written corpus. Compared to native writing, learner writing relied to a higher extent on the most frequent verbs, which in turn carried the most archetypical meanings for the different uses of le (e.g., decir, gustar, and dar for the epistemic, psychological, and benefactive uses, respectively). Beyond lending support to usage-based psycholinguistics models, these findings elucidate for language educators the disparities between learner and native writing and illustrate corpus analyses as a useful tool for language acquisition research.
