Systematic cross-linguistic studies of verbs syntactic-semantic behaviors for ty-pologically distant languages such as Mandarin Chinese and French are difficult to conduct.Such studies are nevertheless necessary due to the crucial role that verbal constructions playin the mental lexicon. This paper addresses the problem by combining psycho-linguisticsand computational methods. Psycho-linguistics provides us with a bilingual corpus that fea-tures verbal construction associated with carefully built extra-linguistic material (short videoclips). Computational approaches bring us distributional semantic models (DSM) to measurethe distance between linguistic elements in the extra-linguistic space. These models allowsfor cross-linguistic measures that we evaluate against manually annotated data. In this pa-per, we discuss the results, potential shortcomings involving cultural variability and how tomeasure such bias.