Morphological Uniformity Principle and Null Subject Parameter:Second Language Acquisition in Young Mandarin-Speaking Learners

• Main Authors: Chia-Ling Wu, 吳佳玲
• Other Authors: Li-mei Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/8m7s98

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系專班 === 92 === Abstract The study aimed to investigate the viability of the Morphological Uniformity Principle and to examine the accessibility of Universal Grammar in young Chinese-speaking learners’ L2 acquisition of English. The experimental tasks used in the present study consisted of a grammaticality judgment task and a guided oral production task. The two tasks were given to 40 Mandarin-speaking beginners learning English as the second language: 20 first-grade students in elementary school, and 20 first-grade students in junior high school. The major findings were summarized as follows: 1. The theoretical construct of the MUP was only positively supported by the results of five out of 40 subjects in the present study and the findings did not offer strong evidence to show consistency with the MUP. 2. Different task types did affect learners in different age groups with respect to verb inflections and null subjects. In the grammaticality judgment task, both groups failed to detect the null-subject sentences in tense clauses. However, in the guided oral production task, subjects in the junior high school group produced much fewer null-subjects responses than subjects in the elementary school group. 3. Most of the L2 learners in this study did carry over their knowledge more in response to nonreferential pronoun It than in referential pronouns. Concerning the accessibility of UG, the Indirect Access Hypothesis was supported because L1 transfer was still significant at this initial stage and parameter resetting would still be possible in the process of the L2 acquisition. 4. As to those subjects who had no access to UG, they might adopt a non-equivalence strategy that contributed to the perceptual saliency of the obligatory sentence subjects. 5. Discourse Oriented Parameter and Null Pronoun Parameter were associated with null argument phenomenon and the default setting of the two parameters was set at the negative values. In conclusion, the findings of the present study argued for the Indirect Access to UG hypothesis and L1 transfer. The results also disconfirmed the viability of the Morphological Uniformity Principle in the context of the L2 acquisition.