The Bootstrapping Research On The Acquisition Of Chinese Double Object Dative

This research conducted two experiments on English-speaking learners of Chinese to explore the acquisition of the Chinese double object dative constructions (DODs) and the function of the bootstrapping procedure in SLA.With the subjects of one group of Chinese native speakers and two English-speaking groups who learn Chinese as their second language, the grammaticality judgment task and the sentence-picture matching task in experiment 1 investigated their acquisition of two types of double object dative construction in Chinese. The result that many L2 learners considered the double object dative as an ungrammatical structure makes us quite strange since the construction we concerned is perfectly grammatical in both English and Chinese. It supported the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis which claims that L2 learners could restructure their initial grammar according to L2 input.To test whether the bootstrapping procedure in L1 acquisition could play a role in SLA, we divided 20 subjects into two groups, each group should study one learning material which provided either syntactic or semantic information. After the learning stage, each subject should have an exam. The result shows that the bootstrapping procedure also works in SLA, and it seems that to L2 learners, the semantic bootstrapping is the main procedure on which people depend.