Syntactic and Semantic Effects on English Relative Clause Acquisition: An Investigation of Taiwanese Senior High School Students

• Main Authors: Kai-Han Wu, 吳楷涵
• Other Authors: Dr. Huei-Ling Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/42021102560782379211

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 英語教學研究所 === 101 === Abstract Syntactic and Semantic Effects on English Relative Clause Acquisition: An Investigation of Taiwanese Senior High School Students Language learners often make great efforts to acquire English relative clauses (RCs), the essential and complicated syntactic structure. The noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) hypothesis, proposed by Keenan and Comrie, intended to predict the difficulty which language learners met in learning RCs. However, due to mixed results contradictory to the NPAH, some researchers attempted to explore RC acquisition from both syntactic aspect (the NPAH) and semantic aspect (animacy of head nouns). What is more, previous research created RC tests with genitive mainly assigned in subject position and thus made genitive unexpectedly easy, which was contradictory to the prediction of the NPAH. Therefore, the present study distributed genitive equally in the positions of subject, direct object, and other objects to reexamine the difficulty order of genitive. Furthermore, previous research mostly adopted controlled tests to explore learners’ RC acquisition; however, the use of natural tests made it more likely to observe how learners exercised RCs under authentic conditions. Therefore, the present study attempted to examine Taiwanese senior high school students’ English RC acquisition by employing both controlled test such as a sentence combination test and a sentence interpretation test and a natural test such as a semi-free writing test. Participants of this study were 155 12th graders in a national senior high school in Hsinchu County. To analyze the results of the three tests, the study adopted SPSS to conduct the two-way repeated-measures ANOVA and the chi-square test. The first finding was that the subjects’ productive ability was more susceptible to the effects of linguistic universals than receptive ability. Second, subject relative clauses following animate head nouns were easier than those following inanimate head nouns for the subjects to comprehend. Third, both linguistic universals and animacy of head nouns were proved to affect the frequency order of the subjects’ RC adoption. Fourth, the frequently-committed errors of ungrammatical pronoun retention and incorrect SU RC and GEN (SU) substitutions for the aimed positions were found in the sentence-combination test. Both linguistic universals and first language (L1) interference led to the occurrence of pronoun retention, with more effects from linguistic universals. As to the incorrect SU and GEN (SU) substitutions, not only linguistic universals but also animacy of head nouns had an impact on the substitution.