A Study On The Acquisition Order Of English Adjectives, Nouns, And Verbs By Chinese University Students

This thesis reports an exploratory study on the acquisition order of nouns, verbs, and adjectives of the English language by non-English-major university freshmen. A total of 90 subjects in three groups were involved in the experiment in the present study, and they were assigned to learn 30 adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Having been instructed and taught 30 new words, each group of the subjects were given an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test on the retention of the words they had been taught. These words are identical in terms of length and frequency but belong to different parts of speech. Viewing the results as a whole, the mean score in the retention of nouns in immediate post-tests ranked the first, with that of verbs the second, and that of adjectives the third. However, the order in immediate post-tests does not help predict the results of the delayed post-tests, where adjectives rank the first, with verbs and nouns following it. The findings indicate that Chinese second language learners, while acquiring English as a second language, follow a sequence similar to that of English-speaking children. The subjects paid minimal attention to the part of speech of a word in addition to its meaning. My findings are that subjects who learn nouns and who make better use of life and surrounding circumstances, and more readily put nouns to use in a real situation, which facilitates this study; while subjects learning adjectives tend to judge a word to be of positive or negative meaning first, which serves as a clue to trace its meaning; subjects learning verbs make use of their syntactic features as an extra aid for the retrieval of the target words, and they also retrieve words through links with social context and learning context.